I never use the usted form, it’s against my principles as an anarchist.

Mexico was my final stop before leaving Latin America, and the end of the solo part of my solo trip. Over the roughly seven weeks I spent there I saw the widest variation of any location on the trip: I had perhaps the best single week of the whole trip, but also some chunks of suck.

Gotta take the highs with the lows.

Chiapas ¶

I spent the majority of my time in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico, arriving only days after it was described as a powder keg that can explode at any moment. But first, I had to get there.

The Worst Border Crossing in the World ¶

When we left off, I’d just set out into Mexico in pursuit of my group and shuttle. Chuckling old men sitting on doorsteps pointed me down random side streets and back alleys and I did, much to my surprise, find the group again. They were loading into a new minibus because some genius decided the Mexican immigration office should be 5 km in from the border.

We got there, and our driver decided that this would be a good time to tell us that we needed:

1. a photocopy of our passport;
2. a printed copy of our onward travel ticket;
3. a printed booking reservation for where we were going to be staying; and
4. a printed copy of our bank balance.

Obviously, 5 km into the Chiapan countryside, none of us had any Internet signal and we’d left all our portable photocopiers at home. My email app.  wouldn’t let me access my emails offline (because that’s disabled by default, and I hadn’t changed it on my new phone), and my banking app.  wouldn’t show my balance without an Internet connection; I also learnt that day that my banking app blocks taking screenshots of it. Also, I had my phone language set to Spanish, just to further compound the frustration.

We found one place that did make copies if you emailed things to them, but they didn’t have any Wi-Fi. We found another that also did copies, but was staffed by the world’s slowest man: it took us no less than 40 minutes to get from asking for the password to getting it. Eventually I got everything printed off (I had to get someone else to take a photo of my phone with the bank app.  open), and the guy charged me 20 pesos; I only had Guatemalan quetzales and some US dollars, so I ended up giving him $10.

This whole ordeal had taken the best part of two hours. As I walked across the road to the immigration office I spontaneously started singing a little ditty of my own creation: I hate Mexico, Mexico is shit. The immigration guy didn’t even look at most of the papers, only the flight booking, which he initally misread as June 23 rather than July and was about to only give me a twenty-odd-day visa. Then he realised and acted like I was el dumbass. He gave me fifty-five days instead: three more than I needed, but whatever.

Next, I had to fill in a customs form. Then he sent me back to fill in more of it, because I was obviously supposed to repeat all of my details in the second section, under the section marked official use only. Then I had to go to the bank next door to pay the ludicrous £30 entry tax—and I thought Nicaragua took the piss!

Finally I was done, but I realised that 20 pesos was the equivalent of around $1.15. I was in no mood to get scammed on top of everything else, so I marched back to the photocopier and demanded my money back; I must’ve looked like I meant business, because he gave it back.

We set off for San Cristóbal de las Casas, and I treated myself to an early night. First thing in the morning I lodged support tickets with my bank and email provider telling them that they could sod right off and that I would be looking at alternatives the moment I’m back home.

Not an auspicious start…

Starting in San Cristóbal ¶

I stayed at Fandango, a cheap as chips hostel with an ideal central location (though not so central that you can’t easily walk to non-tourist-priced eateries nearby). The dorms and private rooms were arrayed around a central courtyard, which occasionally hosted dance classes and fiestas. The actual dorms were elaborate MDF constructions, with coffin-like capsules along the ground floor and larger double bed spaces above:

We’d been told to be wary of the water, due in large part to a massive Coca-Cola factory on the outskirts of the city that has poisoned the water supply. I did a bit of shopping and attended a hip-hop fundraiser gig at La Enredadera calling for the release of Manuel Gómez Vázquez, a Zapatista supporter.

Who are the Zapatistas? On January 1^st, 1994—the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into force—armed guerrillas of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) stormed government offices across the state of Chiapas in protest. Predominantly comprised of indigenous people, they fought against the exploitation of their traditional resources that had been happening ever since the Spanish arrived, and which was about to get a big ol’ US-style turbocharging.¹

People around the world watched—largely via the then-novel Internet—as the Zapatistas battled the Mexican military and associated paramilitaries. 100,000 people protested against the repression in Mexico City. After 12 days, the Mexican government declared a ceasefire. Negotiations were held which resulted in the San Andrés Accords, which promised autonomy and recognition to the indigenous peoples. Then they were ignored. The Zapatistas learned that they could not trust what they call the mal gobierno and would have to do things by themselves.

Over the intervening decades, the Zapatista movement has grown to encompass large swathes of the state of Chiapas. The Municipios Autónomos Rebeldes Zapatistas (MAREZ), as their communities are known, have an autonomous system of direct democracy through the juntas de buen gobierno. They also run their own autonomous health system, education system, and more. The Zapatistas still exist in conflict with the Mexican state, which does not formally recognise their autonomy. Even now, roughly one third of the Mexican Army is stationed in Chiapas.²

Photo by the author

Things have been relatively peaceful since the murder of a Zapatista teacher in 2014 (in an attack that left 15 others wounded), but since the start of the pandemic they have witnessed an uptick in paramilitary violence; on the same day that I arrived in Chiapas, an attack on a Zapatista community to the north-east left 7 dead and 3 wounded, and just last week a Mexican newspaper warned that Chiapas is a powder keg that can explode at any moment. The Zapatistas are no fans of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the current president, who is keen to build a train line for tourists through their territories. On top of that, they face off against anti-Zapatista paramilitaries, drug cartels and other unsavoury characters.

Many of the paramilitary groups were set up by the government of the ’60s–’80s during a period known as the Mexican Dirty War (no prizes for guessing which large neighbour of Mexico’s the murderous right-wing government was backed by). There’s evidence to suggest continued government involvement and direction of their activities since then, and given that it’s Mexico and at least one of the most prominent current drug cartels were formed by former Mexican Army commandos it’s clear that the line between the state, the paramilitaries and the narcos are somewhat blurred. Given that AMLO has staked his reputation on getting his train built, the timing of the increase in violence certainly seems suspect. Though the period of armed conflict seemed to have ended during the 2010s, the Zapatistas never disarmed. They used to joke that their guns were merely sleeping.

They also paint a damned fine mural.

CELMRAZ, Week One ¶

All that talk of paramilitaries and sleepy guns is beyond my pay grade, though. I had two big things on my to-do list for Chiapas, and the first was intended to set me up for the second: attending a language school to improve my Spanish. By this point on the trip I was solidly conversational, but hadn’t actually had any formal schooling. I’d heard about the Centro de Español y Lenguas Mayas Rebelde Autónomo Zapatista (CELMRAZ) from another Volcano Day volunteer, after we went to the beach and I asked him where he got his tattoo of a snail wearing a ski mask.

So I was in Chiapas to visit the caracol of Oventik, sometimes referred to as the Zapatistas’ de facto capital, and one of the few Zapatista communities that are (relatively) open to outsiders.

Photo by the author

Day One ¶

Photo by the author

The first day at the school began sat under a tree, talking (in Spanish) about the concept of work. The promotor explained the relationship between two words in Tsotsil Mayan: a’mtel and kanal. A’mtel refers to work that is performed for oneself, for the benefit of one’s family and community. For example, the promotores de la educación at the CELMRAZ are not paid for their work: their efforts are recognised as being valuable for the community, and so others in their village look after their fields during the alternating weeks they spent there with us. Kanal, on the other hand, is work done to benefit someone else, be that a boss, tyrant or the mal gobierno; it is a corruption of the Spanish ganar that came from the experience of having their labour exploited by the Spaniards for several centuries.

As someone with a wildly eclectic CV, who has regularly devoted more time and effort to voluntary work than paid work and who has been self- or un-employed for about a year now (the line is fuzzy), I like this distinction. In English, when people ask me what do you do, the implication is always what my paid job is, but that’s never been particularly well-defined nor interesting to me. I shared a line that I like from poet Kahlil Gibran: work is love made visible.

Obviously, complaining against wage labour is one thing, but people gotta eat. In capitalism, that means they gotta work to get money to not starve. Any attempt to build an alternative system needs to provide a solution to this. For the Zapatistas, as a rural movement composed predominantly of subsistence farmers, this can partly solve itself: people grow what they need, and eat that. Excess is produced and shared with those who can’t produce for themselves, and responsibilities are shared and rotated to allow people time to attend political meetings, produce crafts, babysit us, etc.

The other part of the Zapatista economy, and probably more relevant to we non-farmers, is the prevalence of cooperatives and collectives. Co-operatives are a worldwide phenomena and a surprisingly large one at that: there are some 3 million co-ops in the world and roughly 12% of the world’s population work with them. In co-ops, worker-members simultaneously work for the co-op and own it, ensuring that the benefits of success accrue to those responsible for them. There are no bosses and no extraction of surplus value. Co-ops also usually provide a range of other social services for members, such as low- or no-interest loans for times of financial difficulty.

Photo by the author

There are several caracoles (Spanish for snail) within the MAREZ. They serve as a sort of meeting place-cum-social space-cum-interface with the outside world; when they were first created in 2003, they were described as being like doors which allow entry to communities and which allow the communities to exit; like windows so that people can look inside and so that we can see outside; like megaphones to project our words into the distance and to hear the voice of the one that is far away. But above all to remind us that we should watch over and be responsive to the totality of the worlds that populate the world.

Photo by the author

Both the snail and spiral iconography are important in the Mayan culture, I was told. For one, the traditional way to convoke a meeting in a Mayan community was to blow on a big spiral horn, with the number of blows corresponding to the message being sent: one meant a meeting of all the men, two meant a meeting of everyone, three meant danger, etc. For this reason, the shell shape has become a symbol of communication. Snails also carry their homes on their backs, and can retreat into them when danger appears. The caracoles are similar; when danger threatens a community, the caracoles become a place of safety and refuge.

He also told me that snails are inoffensive animals that don’t attack others. Similarly, the Zapatistas have no interest in conquering others or forcing people to join the movement; one of their core principles translates to to convince, not conquer.³ This can obviously be a slow process, and the promotor said that some criticise the Zapatistas for moving slowly. To that they say they go at their speed, like the snail; neither quickly nor slowly. Lastly, the spiral shape of the snail’s shell represents the Mayan conception of time as circular, rather than linear. Capitalism’s (and, I should mention, Marxism’s) notions of time as a march of progress towards some objective contrast with the indigenous view of it, which makes sense for agrarian communities dependent on the passage of the seasons and still living in ways similar to how they have for the best part of a millennium.

Photo by the author

The caracol itself (formally Caracol II, as it was the second to be constructed) is built on the side of a hill. Oventik itself isn’t residential, but it houses offices for several Zapatista projects. There’s a long, steep road down the centre with the various project offices off to either side. At the bottom is a clearing with a stage (and basketball court) for outdoor events, and off to the side is the autonomous secondary school that also houses the CELMRAZ. And another basketball court; the Zapatistas really like basketball. On a ridge overlooking the school is an auditorium, which hosts political events, film screenings and more. There are consejos autónomos (sort of the legislative bodies, and generally only gathered together when something needs discussing) for two of the nearby communities, and the office of this municipality’s junta de bien gobierno (sort of the executive body, and permanently staffed).

Caracol II is in the community of Oventik (or Oventic, but they prefer the Mayan spelling), which is in turn one of 44 communities within the rebel municipality of San Andrés Sacamch’en de los Pobres. That, in turn, is one of 7 municipalities in Zona Altos de Chiapas, which is one of the 9 zones that make up the MAREZ. The MAREZ comprised around 360,000 people in 2018, but it’s worth nothing that each of those municipalities also contains settlements that aren’t formally pro-Zapatista, but are either largely sympathetic or still make use of the services provided by the autonomous government.

Later in the day we had another conversation about how we first learned about the Zapatistas, followed by a discussion of the history of Panama and the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.

We ended the day with a documentary, Oventic: Construyendo dignidad, about the construction of the caracol we were in. Construction began in late 1995, and was completed a couple of months later on December 31^st. The work was all done by hand by a huge group that brought together a range of different indigenous groups (many of whom lacked a common language), and continued in the face of constant harassment by the military. In the documentary we saw the community down tools and line up along the road to hurl abuse at the military convoys that drove past every day for the duration of the construction. Details of each vehicle popped up on screen, including their armaments and countries of origin: France; Switzerland; the US.

In a lot of the world, globalisation and foreign investment looks like a French-made tank tread rolling through your fields or a hunk of shrapnel with Made in the US on its side hurtling towards your face.

Day Two ¶

Photo by the author

We started the day with a hike up into the mountains so we could look back down on Oventik and place it into its geographical context. Then we spoke about the Other Campaign and did an activity around it, each taking on the role of a different part of the Other sector and describing how capitalism affected us, after which the others had to guess which group we were.

The Zapatistas emerged from the struggle of indigenous people in southern Mexico for their rights and autonomy, and for the first decade or so following the uprising it remained an insular movement. Even so, foreign support for and continued interest in the movement served as a form of protection that dissuaded the the Mexican government from getting too heavy-handed (generally). But in 2006, the Zapatistas launched the Other Campaign. Mexicans voted out the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in the 2000 elections, marking the first time the opposition parties had won an election since the Mexican Revolution almost a century prior. Mexican presidential terms are 6 years long, and so 2006 marked the next election.

There was an atmosphere of excitement, opportunity and political ferment. The Other Campaign represented the Zapatistas’ realisation that their struggle was not unique, and they did not struggle alone, but was instead one battleground of many in the fight against capitalism and the state system. In the Other Campaign, they sent their de facto spokesman on a tour of Mexico, meeting with hundreds of groups representing other such marginalised and exploited groups: workers; women; gender, sexual and relationship minorities (GSRMs); students; and more. Together they identified the similar (and unique) ways in which the system affected their lives, with the goal of forming networks of support and solidarity and pressuring the Mexican government to reject capitalism and neoliberalism.

For no doubt completely unrelated reasons, the winner of the 2006 election ended the year by sending the Mexican Army into Michoacán state to fight against the drug cartels there (though the homicide rate in Mexico had actually been dropping since 2000). This was the first such deployment and is generally regarded as the start of the Mexican drug war that we all now know and love. Communities were disrupted, violence rose sharply and the Mexican state massively increased its military and paramilitary presence in much of the country. But despite the best efforts of the state, many of the links formed during the Other Campaign have endured and it remains an important moment in the history of both the movement and Mexico.

Later I had a grammar lesson, focussing on pronominal verbs. Spanish has some verbs where the meaning changes depending on whether there is a reflexive pronoun (e.g. , myself, yourself and ourselves in English) is placed before it or not. For example, duermo (from dormir) means I sleep whilst me duermo means I rest or I let my guard down. This being a radical language school, this was taught using sentences like los zapatistas no pueden se dormir por el mal gobierno.

Lastly, for the conversational part of the day, we talked about health and the Zapatista healthcare system. There’s a hospital and a clinic within the caracol, complete with a couple of ambulances, and the work of the promotores de salud is endlessly inspiring. Like with all responsibilities in the autonomous government, the role of promotor is an elected role, unpaid and reassigned on a rotating basis.

The Zapatista system attempts to combine the advantages of modern medicine with the long-standing traditional medicine of the communities. The promotor explained that traditional Mayan healthcare recognised four distinct areas of expertise: the curander@; the hueser@; the parter@; and the yerbater@.⁴ For centuries, those were all that were needed; between them, the societal support networks and the strong sense of community, everything just worked (though I suspect life expectancy stats and the like don’t exist for much of this time).

Photo by the author

Capitalism, and the damage it wrought on those traditional community ties, introduced new conditions, as well as the supposed solutions to them. For example, he said that Coca-Cola was often promoted as having medicinal properties. As a result of this deception (Chiapas has the highest rate of Coke consumption in Mexico, the country with the highest rate in the world) rates of diabetes have skyrocketed. People were then sold pharmaceuticals that would alleviate their symptoms, whilst the underlying issue went unaddressed. This coincides with what I was told at Hospitalito Atitlán, where (though they were by no means radical in their analysis) they identified sudden and relatively recent changes in how people lived (i.e. , from outdoor work to more sedentary living) as a major force behind the epidemic of diabetes. Zapatista healthcare services are open to all, and apparently many non-Zapatistas nonetheless prefer to use them over the state alternatives.

I pointed out that modern medicine can also claim many genuine successes, such as the eradication of smallpox and polio. He agreed, and said that the Zapatistas were by no means against modern medicine in general; only its elevation above all other forms of healing, and its separation from the community as something other, specialised and impenetrably technical. The Zapatistas, he said, view health as comprising much more than just bodily health, but also mental health, social relationships, a sense of purpose, etc. They also focus on preventative work as much as possible; I attempted to translate the phrase an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure into Spanish (and the metric system).

I also told him about Shit Life Syndrome, the idea within the more radical parts of the UK/US healthcare sector that many conditions that are on the rise in those countries—depression, suicide, reduced life expectancy—are inseparable from the socioeconomic conditions in which people are living, and that treating them in isolation without also working for political change is pointless. He told me about the Mayan concept of ch’ulel, which broadly seems to be some sort of life force (like the Chinese idea of qi, or the Austin Powers concept of mojo, baby) that they believe can be diminished by things like kanal and regained via a’mtel. People lacking ch’ulel drink a lot of Coke or a lot of alcohol as a substitute, he said; recognising capitalist ideology for what it is is both a result and cause of increased ch’ulel.⁵

Photo by the author

In the (poetic, beautiful, often hilarious) writings of the Zapatistas there is a recurring character called Defensa Zapatista: a precocious, radical young girl who spends her days playing football and hanging out with a cat-dog, a one-eyed horse and several others. When we went up into the mountains to discuss the Other Campaign, the promotores’ young kids came with us. That gave me the opportunity to snap this, which I think sums up the magic of Zapatismo: a six-year-old girl taking time out of her busy schedule of looking for bugs to sit and listen to a bunch of adults criticising capitalism. Then, back to the bugs.

Mayan child-rearing practices are periodically highlighted in Western media, and they were interesting to observe in Oventik. From their earliest age, children are encouraged to observe household chores, their parents’ work, etc. and to try and help. Play for Mayan children largely consists of miming chores, rather than imaginary space adventuring and transmogrification. There is no age segregation in community life, and Mayan children attend events with people of all generations. They even get involved in the muralling.

Photo by the author

We also played a board game (how did they know how to laser-target my interests so well‽) that was designed by the collective of promotores here at the language centre. It was a bit like a radical Candy Land, as the players take turns rolling a dice to see how many squares they’ll move with the goal of reaching the nuevo mundo in the centre of the snail’s shell. Along the way they land on squares that have them explaining Zapatista organising principles to the group, retreating back to the nearest caracol, obeying tasks decided by the rest of the group (I had to play ditty on guitar one time, and only the fourth one I tried was actually in tune), etc. 

Day Three ¶

My grammar lesson revolved around two forms of the pretérito past tense. Spanish is a funky language, with a bunch of tenses that are functionally the same but which differ in what I can only describe as the vibe. For example, hablé is the simple past form of hablar and used for factual information, whilst hablaba is also I spoke but has some hard-to-define sense of being more sensual, or subjective (and so now I keep thinking of the preterite perfect as the sexy tense). Truth be told, I’m not sure the distinction is something that’ll ever be clear as a non-native speaker, but we had an interesting conversation and I even wrote a short story to practice.

For the conversation part of the day, the promotor explained how Tsotsil has two different words for we: jo’utik and jo’ukutik. The former refers to a collective body, whilst the latter refers to a sub-component of that body. For example, within a family jo’utik would refer to all of the family members whilst ju’ukutik would refer to just you. When talking about your community, however, jo’utik would mean the community as a whole whilst jo’ukutik would refer to your family within it. So on up for your municipality/community, zone/municipality, state/zone, country/state. And ditto for the other way, in theory, for you/your cells, your cells/their chemical components, etc.  (although obviously there aren’t many situations where you would be referring to your cells in the second person). All this reminded me of a book I read some time ago and its idea of the holon.

Photo by the author

He asked me to describe the relationship that I saw between the Zapatistas and the flowers nearby. I talked about the need for the latter to break up the monotony of a grass field; about the large root systems invisible under the surface; and the fact that each plant has many flowers, and one being cut off doesn’t spell the end for the plant. I asked about the pre-Spanish history of the Maya, about which I knew pretty much nothing. He said that Mayan society had been highly hierarchical 1,000 years ago (from when many of the ruins that remain today date), but the people eventually decided that they had had enough of kings and rulers, and so moved out of the cities and into tiny rural communities during an event known as la disperción (I did a little looking around online after this, and this would seem to be around the time of the unexplained ‘Classical Maya collapse’). When the Spanish arrived some 500 years later, they were shocked to find communities without chiefs or soldiers, who routinely rotated roles between themselves.

I finished by asking about the Zapatista approach to justice. He described how the autonomous government and the official government overlap in many places, and explained that when an issue is only internal to the movement, it is dealt with solely by the autonomous government, but when an issue arises that affects others, or is otherwise relevant to them, the autonomous government will work together with the official government, the church and whomever else has an interest. Ultimately, he said, a problem in the community is not just a problem for Zapatistas; it’s a problem for the community and that the ultimate judge is the community. Todos somos policias, he added.

I asked what happens in cases of violent crime and robbery. Murder was the highest crime, he said, and would result in the most severe punishment available: expulsion from one’s community, with the message passed on to all others to deny entry to the offender. The expellee’s possessions are then redistributed amongst the community. Similarly, working for a paramilitary would incur this sanction, as would sexual crimes after a third offence. The Zapatistas do not allow the death penalty, but they also have no faith in the Mexican justice system. The promotor told me about a paramilitary attack in Santa Marta a couple months earlier after which the government declared it would not be able to find the perpetrators; the community flew into action and rounded them up shortly thereafter. He also said there had been many cases where the government would make a big show of arresting the paramilitaries, stick them in jail for a few weeks and then quietly release them back into the community to cause more damage.

For less serious offences (for example, assault), the attacker would be made to pay for any medical expenses for the victim, as well as to work their land for the duration of their recovery, and whatever else the community deemed necessary to make amends. I’ve also read of instances where the community has decided to impose a part-time sentence so that the accused could continue to work their own land to feed their family, on the grounds that if we simply put them in jail, those who really suffer are the family members; the guilty just rest all day in jail and gain weight, but their families are the ones who have to work the cornfield and figure out how to survive. There may be a requirement to attend educational events, particularly in the case of offences against women. The Zapatista justice system, then, aims to be restorative rather than punitive. They do have a police role, but like all roles it is unpaid, elected and undertaken on a rotating basis.

Day Four ¶

We started with another grammar lesson, continuing to focus on those two past tenses and dabbling a little with the subjunctive mood.

For the conversation, I started by asking what makes people decide to join paramilitaries and fight against Zapatismo, when it seems like it’s going against their own interests. The promotor told me about his own uncle who had decided to start a small paramilitary that began causing issues with Zapatistas in the local community (but that the community correctly identified them, rather than the Zapatistas, as the source of the problems, and now the uncle is banished to San Cristóbal). As for the motivation, he explained that there are five political parties in Mexico, and each promises (and in some cases even provides) their supporters with money, food, a social safety net and the opportunity to climb the ranks and gain power. They succeed by dividing the people, whilst Zapatismo succeeds by uniting them, and therein lies the irreconcilable conflict.

I was also curious about what would happen in the event of a bad harvest within the MAREZ, given how agrarian the movement is. He explained to me that the promotores put a lot of effort into providing workshops where people can come to learn ecological techniques for farming without pesticides, or for co-planting different things to promote better soil health. He told me about some new coffee weevil that had arrived at some point in the last decade that was quite a problem, and about traditional techniques of leaving root systems during harvest and dividing plots into thin strips with fencing, which retain and catch soil in the event of heavy rain (as most plots here are on the side of a hill). At first I thought he had misunderstood or evaded the question, but then I realised his answer made sense in the context of focussing on prevention rather than the cure, which we had discussed the day before.

Lastly, he told me about the system of organising responsibilities, or a’mtel patan in Tsotsil. All of the various cargos—from the promotores of heath and education, to media work, to the administration of the juntas de buen gobierno to community policing—rotate regularly, without regard to age (provided they’re an adult), gender, sexual orientation, etc.  All roles are voluntary and require the support of the community; similarly, someone can withdraw at any time. If someone is shown to be manifestly unfit for a role, the community that elected them can also withdraw them, and they can then try their hand at something else instead (in this respect it’s not too dissimilar to being a UK Cabinet minister). The roles are unpaid and taking them imparts no special privileges.

The promotor compared this to the imposed government of the state (ajvalil in Tsotsil), which rotates roles between a small privileged group. The root of that word—ajval—means chief/boss/sir, and within Chiapas often refers to the twenty-five families who dominate the state politically and economically, all of whom trace their lineage back to the Spanish conquistadores (or, as the promotores regularly stressed from their own perspective, the invasores).⁶

Photo by the author

We finished the day with a documentary about the 1997 Acteal massacre—Acteal: Estrategia de muerte—which the promotores framed against the recent upsurge of paramilitary violence as part of a continual campaign of repression coming from the Mexican government. On top of the deadly attack on the village of Polhó last week, one promotor also told us about a police chief from his home village who had been killed the week before, though by whom no-one was certain.

The Zapatistas are well aware that the strategy of the mal gobierno, especially under AMLO at the moment, is to stir up trouble within the various communities in order to try and provoke the EZLN into responding, which would then be used as justification for a massive military response. This, they reckon, is why the recent spate of attacks have not just targeted Zapatistas and their families (as in the past), but the communities in general, regardless of allegiance: the government just wants to sow chaos and discord, and insinuate that the Zapatistas are to blame. This is borne out in the government messaging, which talks constantly about intercommunity conflicts and conflates the EZLN with the cartels and paramilitaries that operate within the state.

It seems to be working, to an extent, and the promotores said that their communities, which had previously been supportive of their work with the movement and understanding of their need to divide their time between the community and the movement, were starting to apply more pressure on them to choose between the two obligations. That is an incredibly difficult position for them to be put in as, from their perspective (and, I think, pretty evidently from what I’ve seen) their communities benefit greatly from the work of the movement, but one should never underestimate people’s willingness to act contrary to their own interests when frightened.

The Zapatistas, and the EZLN in particular, are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place: not responding becomes increasingly difficult as attacks increase in number, scale and blatancy, but any action will be seized on to ramp up the repression and violence. Their best bet is to draw international attention to what is happening as much as they’re able, which is why they had called an global day of action for that first week I was in Oventik. The hope is that by highlighting the actions of the Mexican state and keeping foreign eyes on the region, they can deter any escalation.

Will it work? I don’t know. I think that if the government really wants to pick a fight (and its commitment to several megaprojects in the region suggests that it does) and it can’t provoke the response it wants, it’ll find a way to conjure up some other excuse. I think the present moment may be amongst the most perilous that the movement has faced, not least of all because AMLO is currently subject to a love-in from much of the international Left. But the path the Zapatistas chose to take all those years ago has never been easy to walk, and their success never guaranteed. But they’ll keep organising, as they have done all along, undaunted by the danger because (to quote Subcomandante Marcos) the heart lies below and to the left.

Photo by the author

Day Five ¶

In the grammar lesson we focused on my pronunciation by singing a song—La mar estaba serena—with the lyrics changed to reflect some sort of US–Latin America fishing dispute from the 1970s. La mar estaba serena / Serena estaba la mar became Los yanquis quieren robarnos / Doscientas millas de mar. Then we worked on reflexive verbs. One of the greatest difficulties with Spanish is that many verbs have many different meanings, and at their most complex these meanings can even be opposite to one another and dependent on context, whether you’re using the transitive or reflexive form of the verb, whether you have a pronominal pronoun, etc.  For example, just check out this list of possible meanings for levantar.

For the conversation part of the day, I asked the promotora what Che Guevara, whose face adorns many of the walls in the caracol, means to her and to the Zapatista movement as a whole. She recognised that whilst many of the things that he fought for (as a Marxist–Leninist) are antithetical to the objectives of the Zapatistas, they can nonetheless learn from his mistakes as they do all past revolutionaries, never simply accepting them uncritically.

Then we talked about the intergenerational nature of the struggle. She had been brought up by Zapatista parents and attended an autonomous secondary school the moment one was set up, and the other promotor (her husband) had spent his childhood in the mid-’90s taking food and other supplies up to the guerrillas in the mountains during the initial uprising. This, the promotora said, was a reflection of the way the indigenous communities have always worked: intergenerational households were the norm, and it was traditional for someone to live together with their parents and children and to jointly manage their shared plots of land.

She said that this was the case with her husband, and the two lived with his parents and their two young children. I asked if it was always the case that the wife moved in with her husband’s parents and she said it was; I commented that that must be difficult for parents who have only daughters, and she agreed. The fight against such traditions that disadvantage women is the struggle within the struggle, she said. For example, it was traditional for parents to split their lands between their children when they died, but daughters would receive a much smaller share (though, she added, there were practical reasons for this, as women are less physically able to work the land and so are traditionally relegated to home-making, cooking, childcare, etc. ). However, in Zapatista communities, inheritance must be split equally between sons and daughters. This was just one example of the efforts of the movement to improve the lot of women, dating all the way back to its founding and the Women’s Revolutionary Law.

We then spoke a bit about how the communities had experienced the coronavirus pandemic. She said that it had been very difficult, as poverty and lifestyles mean many indigenous people already have several health conditions, diabetes chief amongst these. In addition, she said many had refused vaccination, in part due to misinformation they had found online or in the media and in part due to a (pretty understandable) distrust of the mal gobierno. The promotores de salud were working to educate people around this, and to provide a more trusted source for medical information for a deeply sceptical community, but it was an uphill struggle.

For the final activity of the week, we took turns sharing stories and legends from our own areas. I shared the legend of Hereward the Wake, and then the story of the 1974 East Kilbride Rolls-Royce factory strike that grounded half the Chilean Air Force following the fascist coup under Pinochet the year before (dry summary here; song version here). The others shared tales of man-eating wolves, Mayan spirits and a bison herd off the coast of California. And just like that, my first week at the CELMRAZ was complete.

Photo by the author

Studying at the CELMRAZ costs money, which all goes to the junta del buen gobierno to spend on its various projects. In the afternoon, we all headed over to pay for the week just past. After some waiting, we were beckoned into the gloomy, warm room. With a huge drawing of Subcomandante Marcos lighting his pipe looking over us, the three guys behind the desk took a look at our accreditation papers and took down the details. Then came the payment; the junta del buen gobierno take administrative matters very seriously, and the three guys (all of whom were, as with all Zapatista cargos, unpaid volunteers who would be rotated for others after a couple of weeks) meticulously double- and triple-checked everything, including running calculations separately on different calculators to ensure that they all agreed on how much change we were due. The caracol had also been without power since about midday the day before, and one of the guys had been impressed by a chargeable lamp that one of the other students had brought, from which one could also charge phones and suchlike. She said she had several and asked if they wanted some for the caracol; the guy said he would ask the others on the junta what they thought. No decision can be made unilaterally, it seems.

San Cristóbal es Mi Casa ¶

Me and the other language students returned to San Cris and went out for a night of craft beers, mezcal and pox. Amongst the many street salesmen of San Cris, the strangest I saw was a man who seemed to be flogging bells to couples seated outside cafes, which I can’t imagine is a very successful gambit. At one point we heard a commotion in the streets and looked out from the balcony of our bar to see a parade of partidistas—I think for MORENA, the party of AMLO—banging drums and blowing trumpets. Just as with Guatemala before it, and Arizona long before that, I’d managed to arrive in the midst of election season.

Photo by the author

I found out, seven months after applying, that I hadn’t got the job in Antarctica I’d been waiting to hear back from. The mild disappointment was tempered by the relief from being finally able to plan my post-return activities. The main activity of the week was a pair of workshops on the political situation in Chiapas, delivered by the Espacio de Lucha Contra el Olvido y la Represión (ELCOR), which were a pre-requisite to my post-CELMRAZ plans. I also settled into a daily food routine that saw me visit Las Carmelitas for their desayano del día offer, and then La Esquina del Chaparro in the mid-afternoon for their large (and filling) menú del día; through these, I think I had a good sampling of Mexican and Chiapan (and Oaxacan) cuisine.

Photo by the author

I stayed at Fandango again, and found that pretty much everyone who had been there before my week at the Centre was still there. The place was rather odd: there seemed to be a sizeable contingent of long-term residents (one guy referred to the money he was paying for accommodation as rent) and some of the inhabitants were a touch kooky. My favourite was a guy who perpetually wore a crop top string vest, along with anywhere up to seven bags and pouches dotted around his body (including, at one point, a utility belt with a small bongo attached). Of course, he also wore a fedora complete with decorative steampunk goggles, and offered people massages apropos of nothing. I started my week-long stay back in the MDF coffins, but soon promoted myself to the MDF castle above:

I took advantage of the weekend salsa lessons at the hostel, and met up with a couple of the CELMRAZ crew back at La Enredadera for a documentary screening of Lupita, followed by a Q&A with the woman herself.

CELMRAZ, Week Two ¶

After my week off, I headed back to Oventik for another week of Spanish study.

Day Six ¶

We kicked off the first day of my second week here at the CELMRAZ by running through the geopolitical situation in Chiapas again, for the benefit of the handful of the new students: we are up to eight from five in my first week. In the grammar lesson, we clarified a couple of near-synonymous words (e.g. , aún and todavía for still), but mostly just ended up having a conversation about Chiapas’ history (it was originally part of Guatemala). I immediately missed my one-on-one tuition from the first week; there were three of us in my Spanish class now, plus the promotor.

Photo by the author

In the conversation we talked more about Zapatismo and the movement. When you say ¡ya basta! there are consequences, said the promotor. He talked about how there are no plans, only the people in constant rebellion. I asked about the agrarian nature of Zapatismo, and how much it applied to urban society. We talked a bit about how the largely agrarian EZLN originated within the more urban Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (FLN) in the ’70s, and the many disappearances during the Dirty War in Mexico. Whilst Zapatismo certainly has a lot of support in San Cristóbal, the promotor said that la ciudad es mas cerca la bocas del lobo and was dangerous.

We watched a documentary in the evening called Storm from the Mountains: The Zapatistas Take Mexico City, about their march on the capital in 2001 to found the Congreso Nacional Indígena (CNI). It’s a real shame that it’s not available anywhere online, because it was full of fantastic Subcomandante Marcos speeches and incredible scenes, chief amongst them an extended sequence in which a huge crowd of unarmed Zapatistas storm a military barracks, getting into fistfights with bayonet-wielding Mexican soldiers without a care in the world (though you can at least get a sense of the speeches from the trailer linked above). Plus, the soundtrack absolutely slapped in a deliciously early-2000s way.

Day Seven ¶

We started by heading back up into the mountains along with 25-odd students from the autonomous secondary school (there were about 40–50 at school that week, so the caracol was a lot less tranquil). There we sang songs (me and the two Americans contributed an all-baritone rendition of the Diggers’ Song) and danced a conga line in the forest: in Zapatismo, everything is possible.

For the grammar part of the day, we played a game invented by the Surrealists in which pairs of cards forming conditional sentences (e.g. , if wishes were fishes and we’d all swim in riches) are divided up and mixed and we each took turns drawing them to form new sentences: some profound, some funny, some meaningless. We ended up talking about co-operative board games and the way the autonomous secondary school uses Monopoly to teach the students about how capitalism works. We also looked at the history of Mayan resistance stretching back to 1712 uprisings and rebellion of Jacinto Canek against the Spanish. We were taught the term el mandón, which means something akin to the bossy one. The people of Chiapas have called many things el mandón over the centuries: in 1994, el mandón was neoliberalism; in 2005, el mandón was capitalism. All of this, said the promotor, went back to the cultural memory of the Mayan collapse and the new forms of living that had to be developed following it.

Photo by the author

To start our conversational practice, we were told to go off and find something—a space, a tree, a plant, whatever—and to have a conversation with it for ten minutes. I found a nice clearing with a little abandoned house and sat listening to the birds, the insects and the wind whilst wondering what exactly I was supposed to be doing. When we got back together, the promotora explained that Tsotsil does not have any word that is the equivalent of things, only existencias. This is because the language apparently doesn’t have the concept of a grammatical object; the closest I can get to explaining how this works is to say that rather than saying I write with my pen on this notebook, you would be saying something like Me, the pen and the notebook together write.⁷

We also looked at the concept of ch’ulel again, with the promotora explaining in the context of what we’d just learnt that it is the result of the mutual recognition of existences (so maybe more like the inner light in Quakerism than Austin Powers’ mojo). She explained that in Mayan culture, one would ritualistically speak to a tree before cutting it town in order to ask its permission (I’m not quite sure how you’re supposed to gauge that the tree is cool with the chopping, though). But ch’ulel also seems to mean something like conscience. She said that it is always present, but sometimes only very small; I asked whether paramilitaries have ch’ulelito, which got a chuckle.

Day Eight ¶

We started the day off clearing vegetation from the coffee field, and as I’d done very little physical activity recently I ended up sore for the remainder of the week.

In the grammar lesson we played the Surrealist game again, but with cards we had written ourselves. I mentioned how anthropologists have described Mayan kids as not taking part in imaginative play as much as their counterparts in places like the US, and the promotor explained how the children here live in close connection to nature and within the Mayan cosmovision, so they don’t need to invent unicorns. We also looked at a few Spanish idioms, because I was keen to transition from talking good English-with-Spanish-words to actually speaking Spanish.

In the conversation the other two students asked a bunch of questions about how the cargos and juntas de buen gobierno work, which I had already covered in the first week. Week one was definitely the better of the two.

Day Nine ¶

For my penultimate day at the school, I wanted to find out more about the theoretical side of the Zapatista movement. The EZLN Wikipedia page describes them as Marxist (amongst several other things) and I’d already had a conversation in my first week about why there were so many pictures of Che Guevara’s face. The promotor said that Zapatismo is a practice, not an ideology, philosophy, doctrine or theory. He talked about how the symbolic references for a movement depend on where it is, and talked about how Latin Americans often comprehend things sensually, rather than rationally. He quoted Surrealist Andre Breton who, upon arriving in Mexico and seeing a cow walking in front of a cathedral, apparently declared that This is Surrealism!

We also talked about Zapata’s agrarian reform and the Mexican Constitution, and discussed how land ownership and work distribution work in Zapatista communities, delineating collective work (i.e. , the necessities of the community, like building schools), communal work (e.g. , seed planting) and co-operative work (e.g. , the shops in the caracol, which operate to generate money).

The distinction between the grammar classes and the conversations was pretty fuzzy all of this week.

In the actual conversation part of the day, we talked about the concept of buen vivir (literally living well, or more idiomatically the good life). The Zapatistas recognise that this is the goal of any liberatory movement and that it will look different in very culture, person, etc.  The promotor talked about industrial society as new and superficially nice-looking, but in reality it creates perceived needs that everyone got along fine without before, and creates new problems that it claims to be the solution to.

She talked about health problems in this context, pointing to the increases in diabetes and cancers. Diabetes (as I’ve talked about before) is pretty clearly linked to lifestyle changes, but increasing cancer rates are generally related to people living longer and thus having more time to develop them. On this note, I asked her whether there is a similar concept of buen mourir, because there are certainly people who argue that just living as long as we possibly can is missing the point. She talked about the Mayan approach to death, seeing it as a passing to another dimension or place, and the Zapatista idea of a dignified death within the struggle (not necessarily in combat).

Photo by the author

Lastly, we talked about the next generation of Zapatistas, currently studying at our very location. I had heard elsewhere that some 90% of young people in Zapatista communities choose to get involved in the movement, and they were certainly enthusiastic singing the songs up in the mountains the other day, but financial realities and the deteriorating security situation are also leading to a lot of young emigration to the US for work.

Day Ten ¶

Photo by the author

My final day at the CELMRAZ began with a conversation session. I asked about how the autonomous secondary school works, and what a typical day looks like for the students. The promotora explained that the students board for two weeks each month for around 2–3 months at a time, and are split into groups who take it in turns to be responsible for communal tasks (cooking, chopping wood, etc.). They attend classes from 9 till 5 (although sometimes we would be woken up around 5:30 by them playing basketball or guitar, because they’re used to getting up at the crack of dawn back home). From 3 till 5 they’re free, and then they get back together for a group activity between 5 and 7.

She said that some of the promotores were barely older than the students, and would often get involved in basketball, etc.  too. After three years of secondary education, the students then choose an autonomous project to get involved with, be that with the health system, education system, media collectives, etc.  In theory they could go straight to work for the junta de buen gobierno, but she said they usually start with something smaller unless they have a lot of experience already.

The classes provided include maths, history, humanism, social sciences, natural sciences, physical education, art, languages and health (which includes sex education, which is traditionally never addressed in most of the communities). Students sleep in gender-segregated rooms, but the school is otherwise co-educational. Men and women were traditionally prohibited from working together, so this is another way in which the movement is changing people’s perceptions: things are always improving poco a poco.

Whilst this is the only autonomous secondary school for the whole zone (hence the boarding; students came here from all different municipalities), the autonomous primaries are dotted around every municipality and students don’t board at them. She said there was no strict starting age for those, and that kids were welcome to start attending whenever they wanted, or even to attend specific subjects if that was all they were interested in.

Photo by the author

Then we talked about how food production works in the MAREZ. Our zone, Zona Alta, struggles due to having little fertile land. Fertiliser is a necessity, and the promotora said that the bad government provides chemical fertiliser from Monsanto along with seeds. These are bad for the land, but people need to make enough food; she said this one of the primary drivers behind emigration to the US. Other zones within the MAREZ, though, produce all they need and even a bit of surplus.

Chiapas does not lack for fertile land, but the bulk of it is held by the large-scale rancheros and finceros; we again returned to the twenty-five rich families that appropriated that land under the conquistadores and continue to dominate state politics now. The promotora also acknowledged that life was not perfect before the Spanish conquest, but that a lot of conservative practices that they are fighting in the communities were not originally Mayan, and instead were introduced by the Spaniards (see also, the role of women in the British Isles pre- and post-Normans).

For the final grammar lesson, we actually did a bit of grammar! We touched on conditionals, the subjunctive mood and various irregular verbs, as well as how to pronounce the ü that occasionally appears in Spanish words. Then we all reviewed a piece of homework I’d been given over my week off, in which I practised two types of past tense by writing about my main man Albert Camus. Given that I was in a class with the Franco–Belgian couple, that led to a final conversational digression on the subject of French and Belgian colonialism. We finished with one last song, La hierba de los caminos, which ends with the following stanza:

¿Cuándo querrá el Dios del cielo
que la tortilla se vuelva
(¿Cuándo querrá Dios del cielo
que la tortilla se vuelva)

Que la tortilla se vuelva
que los pobres coman pan
y los ricos mierda, mierda?
(que la tortilla se vuelva
que los pobres coman pan
y los ricos mierda, mierda?)

Lastly but by no means leastly, we spend a chunk of time in the afternoon learning how to make tortillas.

It Was the Worst of Times… ¶

I spent the Monday of the following week at the first of two more preparatory workshops for my next activity in Chiapas. In them we covered… the history and geopolitical context of Chiapas! For like the third or fourth time now!

Photo by the author

I was very hungry at 12, even hungrier at 1:15 when we finally broke for lunch and so hungry by the time the others had finished nattering at 1:40 that I shouted when I was told that the guy leading the workshop wanted to join us after picking his son up from school, so we wouldn’t even be ordering until 2. In any case, he arrived late.

We went to a vegan café that my compa suggested; they didn’t have any choice, it was the menu of the day or bust. The meal on the board actually sounded great—stuffed plantains—but that was yesterday’s meal: we got a thin broccoli soup and a meal I could best describe as appetiser-esque. I tried to get some money out, but I think it was some sort of social service payout day and there were queues around the block for every cash machine.

We returned for more workshop, but no more Spanish was going into my brain at this point. Back at the housing co-op I was staying at, they had a house assembly that evening. Despite my best efforts and the fact I was only staying there for four nights, attendance was mandatory (I was not told about any of this before I arrived). Already cranky, I had to sit and listen to a bunch of people I barely knew and wouldn’t have the time to get to know check in with their biggest adventure of the week and discuss housing matters that had little to no relevance to me.

One of the housemates had been ill, and I’d picked up her cold so spent the night spluttering on my own sinus juice instead of sleeping. By the following morning it had gotten worse, and I only had so many sachets of Lemsip. I spent what little time I had that morning playing musical showers because none of them had hot water.

I went to collect the laundry I’d left at the launderette on Saturday, and which I’d been told would be ready by the Monday just past. They didn’t open till 9, so I went out for a breakfast of (cold) scrambled eggs. When I came back, they said they wouldn’t be ready until the afternoon, and that they closed at 2: based on the previous day’s experience, I wouldn’t be back in time to pick them up, so I took the unwashed clothes and settled into day 3 of my current pair of pants.

The cash machines still had massive queues that morning, so no money for me. The cold was doing my head in, and on the walk back to our place for a long lunch break I smashed my toe into the kerb and had to walk halfway across the city with my flip-flop getting increasingly sticky with blood. I got back in time to have collected my laundry, had I left it at the launderette.

Photo by the author

Of course the pinche washing machine in the pinche house was only for the pinche housekeeper. And of course the pinche housekeeper left 20 minutes before I was told that, so I couldn’t ask her for a favour. And of course the only pinche launderette that was open charged me six times as much as the original one to get my clothes done by that pinche evening. And of course it took me a pinche hour to find a pinche cash machine that hadn’t been drained that pinche morning.

Sometimes you have a period of time where everything is pretty shitty. I was two days into one, and if I hadn’t have vented (on my tracker) I’dve screamed. I was excited to be rid of San Cris the following day.

BriCO Boys ¶

The next morning, I headed out with a German compa (who, coincidentally enough, I had met at the CELMRAZ my second week there) to the hamlet of Acteal. We were to spend two weeks there as a two-man team of human rights observers, as part of the Brigadas Civiles De Observación (BriCOs) (original Spanish here; English version here).

Acteal itself isn’t a Zapatista community, but it’s run by a sympathetic Christan pacifist group called las Abejas who are organised similarly, with health and education promotores, rotating positions, etc.  The settlement itself sits slap-bang in the middle of the multi-directional Chiapan conflict that I’d been learning about for the past few weeks. Nearby villages have received an influx of people displaced from other villages in the region (such as Polhó), cartels and other criminal groups funnel drugs, arms and humans through the area and a suspiciously well-armed autodefensa militia recently appeared in the nearby town of Pantelhó, who nobody seemed to trust. There was also some sort of other armed group in the area that didn’t have a name and nobody knew much about. On top of this was all the usual murky involvement and harassment from the police and military. The Abejas’ dogged campaigning finally resulted in the Mexican government admitting responsibility for the massacre in 2020, but they continue to push for the then-President (and several other intellectual authors of the crime) to be tried in court.

We were in Acteal to document any human rights abuses or security issues and to keep the organisation that was sending us—the Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas—informed about the developing situation. We were stuck within the small camp pretty much the whole time—the road outside was considered unsafe, as was just about all of the surrounding area—so I loaded up my e-reader with books, my laptop with films and my luggage with a guitar.

Our arrival coincided with a multi-day fiesta for San Pedro, the patron saint of this region. We were treated to a brass band, fireworks, chicken soup and locally-made coffee, and drinking the water here (although after it had been boiled) didn’t seem to do us any harm. Most importantly, I finally found myself elevated off the ground in a hammock the way the good Lord intended, for the first time since arriving in Mexico. Things were looking up.

The Abejas run Acteal kind of like a Zapatista caracol; there were a couple shops there (including Lupita’s own corner store), but only a couple people living there semi-permanently. It is mostly used for gatherings, events and (during the time we were there) as a place of refuge. It’s run by a group called the mesa directiva who are elected and vaguely analogous to the junta de buen gobierno, but with longer terms and more authority. But the Abejas are still primarily an indigenous organisation fighting (peacefully) for their rights, land and autonomy; they aren’t Zapatistas, but they’re cut from the same cloth.

Whilst we were there, a new armed group appeared in Pantelhó (up the road) and may or may not have taken over the town hall. They demanded that the Army come in and kick out the self-professed autodefensa group El Machete, who they accused of being a criminal group and responsible for several disappearances, or they’d do it themselves. Only the Mexican and local news covered the events, as far as I can tell. The government were saying everything was under control, and from what we could gather there were a lot of cops and soldiers in Pantelhó and the roads leading up to it.

In terms of Mexican DEFCON levels this seemed to be somewhere above an ¡ay-ay-ay! but below a ¡Dios mío!; in the British system that’s somewhere between a kerfuffle and an oh dear oh dear. Other than receiving occasional updates on that conflict up the road, our time passed uneventfully.

Photo by the author

The big church in the centre of the hamlet was built after the 1997 massacre. At the back of the village was another small church building, which we didn’t see used for anything except storage during the time we were there. Whilst the building itself was new, it was built on the site of the former church where many of the women tried to hide during the massacre; most were killed. The floor of that church is untiled, revealing the bare earth on which the original church stood.

A detailed account of the massacre itself is available here. Even given that it’s a massacre, it’s still probably more harrowing than you expect. However, the reality is not shied away from by the community, even 25 years on; from another article:

Every year, the people of Acteal relive the horror of what happened that day, recalling the events in vivid detail. Some perform re-enactments. Villagers see the ritual retelling of their story as essential, not only as a way to pay respect to the martyrs who helped bring global visibility to the guerrilla war in Chiapas, but also as a reminder to those who remain in power that the horrors that took place here will not be erased from history.

There has thusfar been no official effort to hold those ultimately responsible for the massacre to account. The murderers themselves, though initially arrested and given long sentences, were progressively released early back into the surrounding communities. Though the new AMLO government has finally acknowledged the government’s role—from forming and supporting the paramilitaries in the first place to nearby Army forces not responding despite being able to hear the gunfire to then trying to quietly dispose of the bodies—their response was to try and buy the silence of the victims and survivors (and that linked article also includes several quotes from Simón Pedro, later assassinated). Some Abejas took the financial settlement; don’t forget, these guys are by almost all measurements dirt-poor. But the majority have refused anything less than justice being done, and I really hope that one day they get it.

Photo by the author

…It Was the Best of Times ¶

So ended the least exciting two weeks of this whole trip.

Me and my compa had both been ill most of the brigade. I started ill, got a bit better around the midpoint and then either relapsed or got a fresh new cold (or, more likely, COVID-19, as there was an outbreak back at the house in San Cris a couple days after we’d left). We’d also been blowing our way through our toilet paper supplies as tissues and ran out the day before we left. So, when the mesa directiva invited us to a parting coffee on the morning of our departure (before a two-hour-long and very windy drive) I was a bit nervous, but then it turned out there was no coffee: only a nice, non-caffeinated lemon tisane.

The journey was uneventful, and the mountain ranges appeared very strange and alien as we rose out of the valley because I’d decided to listen to Huun-Huur-Tu in the taxi. We gave the outgoing group a quick debrief and then I headed off to my hotel, which turned out to be a much shorter walk than I’d expected.

I was in room #46, but that turned out to only be on the second floor. The shower looked unimpressive until I turned it on and realised it was probably the best I’d had in months. I’d had almost exactly as many pesos as I needed to pay for my hotel room, so I went out to the cash machine and found it with no queue, and it worked first time. I went to Las Carmelitas for their desayano del día, and it turned out to be exactly what I didn’t know I needed after two weeks of mostly rice: enfrijoladas montadas con carne. I also had a carrot cake, because why not.

Later, back in my room, I went to wash my hands and realised there was no soap. I was thinking I’d have to traipse down to the reception to ask for some, when I realised there was some provided on my side table. Then, as I went through my bags, I found another bar hidden away that would do me as a backup for the remainder of my time in Mexico.

I turned on my laptop and realised I hadn’t taken a photo of the Wi-Fi login back at the reception. But then (and by this time I was starting to predict ways things could work out for me) it turned out I can view saved Wi-Fi passwords on my phone. I noticed that the hotel offered a laundry service and it turned out to be pretty cheap, and they said they’d have the clothes ready by the morning.

For dinner I looked up a pizza place someone at Fandango had recommended to me, buy it was a bit far. But, there was another pizza place about half the distance away called La Minerva. I went and got a huge pizza to go, and on my way home realised I had no hot sauce. However, as I had by this point kind of assumed, there was a tub of the stuff included in with the pizza, and it was one of the best hot sauces I’ve ever tasted. Plus, when I got back, the hotel reception told me they’d done my clothes already.

So now I found myself with three nights in a nice swish hotel (read: the cheapest place in San Cris that offered private rooms and bathrooms). We had a final brigade debrief the following afternoon, but we’d already wrote up our report as we went along so it didn’t take long. Otherwise, I downloaded a bunch of games and barely left my room for anything that wasn’t edible.

Sometimes you have a period of time where everything is just peachy. I had several days of one. I was happy to be back in San Cris and I was excited to be wrapping things up soon. With the exception of the church across the road from my hostel deciding that 6am was an ideal time to launch fireworks each morning, my final days in San Cris passed pleasantly. I’d been unsure about whether or not to go to the beach for the end of my time in Mexico, as the weather forecast didn’t look particularly promising:

Screenshot by the author

Prediction: all of the symbols, simultaneously.

However, the weather forecast for San Cris looked about the same, yet I’d seen uninterrupted sunshine since I got back. I decided to throw caution to the wind and book a redeye coach to Oaxaca: storms or no storms, I was off to the beach!

Oaxaca ¶

The bus ran overnight, but I lucked out with two seats to myself for most of it. I did get into a shoving match at one point with one woman who insisted on reclining her seat all the way back whilst I was reaching forward to get something, even after I tapped her on the top of the head and asked her to hold on a moment, but otherwise the ride was uneventful.

My hostel wasn’t far from the bus terminal, so I walked over at 7am. One guy stopped me to ask where I was from (I guess recognising me as a tourist wasn’t too hard, laden as I was with bags), and then followed up by immediately asking whether I had WhatsApp. He said he had moved to Huatulco several years ago (I assume from the US, based on his accent) and likes to help people out. Maybe he was trying to flog me tourist tours, maybe this was a drug solicitation effort uncharacteristically early in the day, or maybe he just genuinely did want to give me tips for the place; either way, I hadn’t had enough sleep to parse what was going on (and had decided to stop in the middle of crossing the road) and it felt a little odd, so I said I’d give him my number if I saw him again and walked on. I never did.

The reports of Huatulco’s raininess had been overstated, but the weather was nonetheless not ideal for beach tripping: it was Honduras-level hot, but humid and not particularly sunny. After a couple days of sweating myself inside-out in an otherwise-empty hostel, where all of the nearby eateries seemed expensive, I decided to book a flight to Mexico City for the latter half of the week. Shortly after doing so, I discovered a bunch of cheap comedores nearby and was joined by a few others in my dorm. One of these was a girl from Veracruz who I told about my goal of visiting a beach in the morning before my flight; she was keen to join, so we made a rough plan.

Come the morning, the sun was out in force like I hadn’t seen all week. We took a taxi to the trailhead and walked for forty-five minutes through forest as the bugs took their several pounds of flesh. Finally, we arrived at Playa Cacaluta: the filming location of one of my favourite films, and an absolutely perfect Pacific beach. We lay in the sun for several hours, listening to the crashing of the (very powerful) waves.

Photo by the author

After getting back to La Crucecita and having lunch, it was off to the airport.

Mexico Shitty ¶

I have very little to say about Mexico City, except that it was shit. In a region full of charmless major cities, Mexico City was the bleakest. In that spirit, the place I stayed—Hostal Ciudad de Mexico—was easily the worst place I stayed all trip, and the only time I felt compelled to leave a review. To top it all off, a launderette stole all of my socks.

The highlight of my not-short-enough stay in the City was getting up at 4am on the Sunday to go to the airport and leave it, thus ending the most divisive part of my trip: the highs were the highest but the lows were the lowest.

Costa Rica ¶

It was my third time passing through San José—its airport is just too convenient a hub to pass up—and I decided to stay a little outside the city for a few days.

Alajuela, Alajuela ¶

I flew back into San José, and decided to stay for a long weekend to sort out some admin. Not in the city itself, which I was still not enamoured with, but in the outskirts town of Alajuela, where the allegedly San José-based airport is actually located.

Photo by the author

In my room I met an old American guy. Within moments of us talking, and with no prompting from me, he started telling me how many countries he had visited. There was an interesting twist in this case, however, as it turns out he has a world map tattooed on his back and is a minor travel celebrity: he has his own blog and has been covered in a couple of mainstream press pieces from the likes of ABC and the Mail (where someone in the comments criticised him for his use of the Mercator projection, which was very much not what I expected from that particular cesspit).

I’ve talked before about not being keen on the whole idea of travel bagging, but at least his chosen approach is fairly novel, and he’s suffering for his art; he did say that Russia was a nightmare to get coloured in. But there wasn’t much else going on in Alajuela, and he was nice enough company. He also seemed to be having the most intense week of his life: when I met him he was engaged to a much younger Costa Rican lady he’d met a week prior, and over the course of about three days I think I saw the prospective marriage collapse. I’m not sure what the final outcome was, and he’s not yet updated his blog, but have a feeling he’s landed on his feet.

Honduras ¶

I’d had to put the kibosh on my original plan of navigating my way up along the Caribbean coast, instead settling for the easier (i.e., definitely possible) option of just getting a bus.

Honduras, Ho! ¶

After a few days of decompression, it was time for a marathon coach trip: three days of travel, two of which would be spend entirely riding the bus, which would take me all the way from San José up to the northern Caribbean coast of Honduras. Unsurprisingly, the coach trips themselves were pretty uneventful. As we passed through Jinotepe I noticed a lot of joggers and, by the looks of it, Nicaraguan ones. This stood out at weird because I couldn’t recall having seen anyone except gringos doing any form of exercise the whole trip.

I spent the first night in Managua, in the Hotel Tica Bus built into the bus terminal that I’d noticed when I came through here in the other direction on my way to Cuba. It was about what you’d expect for ~$10 per night, but the convenience was well worth it since I was up at 5am the next morning.

Photo by the author

The second coach brought me into Honduras, via Tegucigalpa and onwards to San Pedro Sula. The immigration office at the border was a small building with several poorly-signposted counters along each side, and the queues for each snaked around, into and through each other with little management. Women walked up and down carrying baskets on their heads offering snacks and little kids in scruffy clothes did the same asking for change. Once they’d tried their luck with each person in the queue, they started playing football with an old sandal.

As we drove through Honduras, I was not thrilled at the views from the bus windows. As far as I can tell, every single Latin American litters like it’s going out of fashion, and there had been an ambient level of background trash that I’d seen everywhere and had largely adapted to. Honduras, though, was something else, and there were entire stretches of roadside where one couldn’t see the grass for all the plastic:

Photo by the author

Finally, after two long days of travelling, I was in San Pedro Sula: Honduras’ second-largest city and the one-time murder capital of the world (now #42). I probably could have got in and out the same day without leaving the bus terminal, but there was a B&B not too far away and I thought I could do with a comfy night’s sleep. But reading about the city doesn’t paint the rosiest picture:

Though it has a very bad reputation for being a dangerous city, it also offers gastronomic and cultural diversity at its best. … Just be aware of your surroundings at all times.

But crime stats, as I’ve talked about before, come with many caveats. Usually, and certainly in this case, those homicides are mostly to do with gang and drug conflicts, which I would be hard-pressed to involve myself in in just a couple of days. Also, if you look at the list of the 50 cities with the highest homicide rates in the world, 8 are in the US, with all but Philly higher than San Pedro Sula. Although one thing I’ve taken away from looking into this is just how compartively safe Europe is: the UK’s four most dangerous cities—Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and London—have a combined rate of a little over 8 homicides per 100,000 people, whilst the US’s highest city is over 10 times that on its own.

However, one thing I had read was not to get in the taxis waiting outside the bus station, which are apparently largely controlled by organised crime and known to take clueless tourists down dark alleyways to rob them (or worse). I asked the place I was staying if they could call me a taxi, and they just told me to use Uber. After my recent experience with Airbnb I was expecting trouble, but to my surprise the registration process was smooth and I soon had myself a ride. I’d never really seen the appeal of Uber in the UK, but after my experiences getting high-balled by taxi drivers here and given the added sense of security it provides, I can see why the service has spread like wildfire in this part of the world.

My B&B (Casa Altamira) was nice enough, although there was nowhere to get food nearby. However, the lady who ran the place cooked me up a free breakfast the next morning, which was jolly nice. I got another ride back to the bus terminal, and the driver did a spit-take when I said I was from the UK. He said he’d never met a Brit before; we don’t tend to come to this part of the world.

I hopped on the bus to Tela, but it dropped me off a couple kilometers away from the place I was going to stay. After some lunch and a coffee, and several abortive attempts to book another taxi, I decided to just set off walking with my bags.

By the time I arrived, I had probably lost about 20 kg in water.

Tela Me All About It ¶

Tela is a small beachside town, and I was staying outside of the centre at Hostel Casa Verde. One trip to the nearby beach was enough for me; not even it was spared from the trash onslaught:

Photo by the author

Instead, I spent most of my time laying in the rooftop hammock and looking out over the other houses. It had been about a month since I last had a hammock, and this was a sweet reunion indeed. However, Honduras was markedly hotter than anywhere else I had been (except perhaps León), so even just laying perfectly still would cause one to sweat profusely.

After my first one for breakfast back in San Pedro Sula, here my crippling baleada addiction further developed. There was a small hole-in-the-wall place at the end of our road called Golosinas Yireh that served sizeable ones for next to nothing, so I ate there every day. My hostel kept us supplied with all the watermelons we could eat, and between the two I’m sure I was hitting all the most important food groups. For a special treat, the hostel owner’s son drove me and a couple other guests into the town proper for dinner at Aloha Bar & Grill, where they offered a ‘megabaleada’ which was sure to plug any remaining dietary gaps.

I was sharing a room with a German girl, and the bunk bed setup was ideal for long conversations; not being able to see the other person gave it a psychiatrist’s sofa-esque feeling, and we talked a lot. There was also a German guy staying at the hostel, and after the girl had left the two of us went on an excursion to the nearby Garifuna village of Triunfo de la Cruz, which Wikivoyage had suggested was one of the more interesting things to do in the area.

Photo by the author

Our taxi dropped us off around 9:30, and we wandered for a while trying to find anything that was open. I’d read up on the village and had an idea of a few places I wanted to check out, but it soon became clear that we’d come far too early. We waited by the beach for a while. A guy came and sat with me, showing me videos on his phone of him singing and playing piano (always shirtless, for some reason), whilst I watched the German guy struggling to set up his phone to automatically take a picture of him sat on a boat in the distance. Eventually I took pity and asked if he wanted me to take it for him.

We headed back to the centre of the village as things started to liven up. We found Panaderia La Lucha and bought some gorgeous coconut flapjacks, and then joined a few guys sitting at a bar (Tiquina Bar, really just a table outside somebody’s home). We asked why everything was closed, and one of them told us that we’re lazy, we don’t work before 11. Me and the German had a couple beers, whilst the locals clearly preferred smokier, more herbal intoxicants.

We were about done with Triunfo, but I wanted to find some guifiti (a traditional Garifuna bitters). With some direction from our new bar friends we set off up the main road out of town towards the workshop of Don Ceferino Norales. We found him in the middle of making some drums, and after a brief conversation me and the German each walked away with a small bottle of home-made brew.

One taxi ride back to Tela later, we decided to sample our new wares:

Fruity Business ¶

Throughout this journey, I’ve highlighted a lot of the impacts of US machinations in the region. No matter where you go in Latin America, it’s a near certainty that the US will have been behind something absolutely atrocious there, often in the not-so-recent past. But why?

During the Cold War, the excuse given was that the US was fighting communism, but this sort of thing predates the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union. The threat of communism was always a lie, or at least only a partial truth, and the real reason was far simpler: some rich people, whose interests the US system primarily serves, wanted to become richer, and millions of people had to die to help them do that.

There were some variations on which exact group of rich people were involved in each country, but in many instances the greatest monster was the same: the United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita). This company made phenomenal profits throughout the 20^th century from extracting the wealth of several Central American nations and exporting their natural resources back to the US. With the might of the US behind it, it held such power in the domestic politics of each victim country that they came to be known as ‘banana republics’.

This would obviously arouse local opposition, and in each case the course of events would be depressingly similar: a leader would be democratically elected on a promise to abolish the slavery-like working conditions on the fruit plantations and to nationalise the industry so that the wealth generated could benefit the people of the country instead; the US would find some promising young fascist (often an Army officer of some sort) and train them up in the School of the Americas in Georgia; they would then foment, arm and fund a military coup that would replace the elected leader with their chosen puppet (often assassinating them in the process); then they would either turn a blind eye to, or in many cases actively support, any right-wing death squads, environmental destruction or outright genocides that their dictator decided to implement; and sit back as the profits continued to roll in.

Photo by the author

I say all of this now because Tela was a major transport hub for the United Fruit Company. The old offices of the Tela Railroad Company still stand, though the building is a museum now. The pier where once blood-soaked bananas and other produce from Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, etc.  would arrive ready to be shipped off to the US is in partial disrepair now, though there are many people along it trying their luck with the fish. Children swim in the sea around its base, at this place where—until recently—the final stage of the grand heist of the region’s natural wealth was conducted.

Photo by the author

Dotted throughout the town are several disconnected sections of railway track, usually wherever the path of the track crossed what is now the main road. These were the tracks that carried the fruit from the interior to the coast for export. This whole region of the world is deeply scarred by a century-plus of US colonialism; these particular scars are just more visible than most.

Photo by the author

The Honduran currency—the lempira—is named after a chief of the indigenous Lenca people who led resistance against the Spanish conquistadors; the 1 lempira note carries his image. This comes off as a bit cheeky when Honduras has been for many years one of the deadliest countries in which to be an environmentalist, with many unsolved murders of primarily indigenous people, of whom Berta Cáceres is perhaps the most well-known

In the interest of ending this mini-essay on a high note, it’s worth noting that the future currently looks brighter for Honduras than some of its neighbours, through the election last year of Xiomara Castro (Honduras’ first female president). The wife of the former president who was ousted by a military coup in 2009 (the whole situation around that is a big complicated mess), her election signalled the end of over a decade of a brutal and wildly corrupt right-wing government (backed by… yup, you guessed it). Her government has already declared electricity to be a human right and made provision for Honduras’ poorest to receive it for free, along with banning open-pit mining, halting the evictions of indigenous families and initiating a crackdown on gang violence.

The odds are stacked firmly against Castro, but several of the Hondurans I’ve spoken to are optimistic, saying that the country is safer now than it has been for some time. There also seems to be an emerging middle class here: there were plenty of Hondurans in León with the disposable income to spend on volcano boarding, and unlike in somewhere like El Tránsito, in Tela all of the fancy walled houses on the beachfront seem to belong to Hondurans, rather than Americans and Europeans.

I spoke to a couple older Hondureños the other day who had spent decades living in the US, but who were now coming back home to retire; I don’t think that’s a choice that too many would have made a few years earlier. One of them effectively summed up the same vibe that I’ve seen all over Central America, telling me that this is one of the poorest areas of Honduras, but the people here are happy; they love to come see the view, and they love to dance.

Photo by the author

Utila, I-tila, We All Tila Together ¶

After some time at the beach, it was finally time to head to the island of Utila; the entire reason I was in Honduras to begin with. Since being told about it by my American travel buddy back in Panama, I was keen to cross off my project goal of learning to dive at the cheapest place around. I think, even taking into account the travel required to get there, it still worked out cheaper than somewhere like Santa Catalina.

I first spent a night in La Ceiba, accidentally timed to coincide with Central America’s largest Carnevale celebrations. I didn’t fancy them, but saw plenty of footage of women in elaborate costumes dancing on every TV I encountered whilst waiting for my food. My hostel was accessed via a Chinese restaurant, which I certainly wasn’t complaining about.

I finally arrived on the island and made my way to Paradise Divers, which I’d been recommended by my Panama pal. I was there to do an Open Water Diver course, initially via PADI, but at the instructor’s suggestion that SSI was more flexible I switched; the cost was the same, and it would all be equal once I got back to the UK and adapted to our own system.

Photo by the author

The first day of the course introduced basic kit handling, followed by a swim test—dull, but easily passed—and some shallow-water descents to demonstrate skills like underwater mask removal. We got through these in record time, my instructor saying I was tied for the fastest student she’s ever had; apparently I was surprisingly placid about removing my regulator underwater, whilst most people struggle with it.

The second and third days featured two dives each with a couple of exercises to start and finish, but generally just finning along at a leisurely pace. I made sure to get the most use out of my newly-acquired action camera as possible. There was also a theory component that I postponed to the last day, but it didn’t prove particularly taxing; the biggest challenge was getting the SSI mobile app.  to work with the ropey Wi-FI connection.

Photo by the author

I had expected the course to take a full week, but we were done in just a few days. I wanted to fill the rest of my week there with something, and initially embarked on the SSI Advanced Adventurer course, thinking it was the same as Advanced Open Water Diver. However, after the first couple of dives I realised that the two were separate: the latter was a level of recognition, to be achieved automatically after a set number of dives and specialty courses, whilst the latter was a qualification-free taster package of different specialities. I had also had a reply from BSAC to my enquiries about how different courses compare, and knew that this would provide me nothing in my home system, whilst the BSAC Ocean Diver course included a couple things that my Open Water Diver had not. To fill those gaps, I decided to switch to the Enriched Air Nitrox speciality course instead.

As I had a couple of free dives as part of my Open Water package, this worked out fine; I just retrospectively re-classified the two Advanced Adventurer dives as fun dives. They were still useful learning experiences: one was a deep dive, where we got to see the effects of absorption on the visible light spectrum first-hand (as well as pressure, the instructor having brought a sealed plastic bottle down from the surface); the other was a navigation exercise, and it turns out ‘okay, now get us back to the boat’ is easier said than done when all parts of a reef look pretty similar.

Photo by the author

The accommodation at Paradise Divers was very basic, but there was a good group of people there. We had a café on-site which did very cheap baleadas, as did Mama Rosa #2 in town, which became a regular breakfast haunt. I think across the whole time I was in Honduras, I only had a couple non-baleada meals.

When we weren’t diving we went out on snorkeling trips across the bay:

Photo by the author

We also went out drinking most nights. One time we went to a ladies’ night where the girls drank for free, and the bar staff told us snippily that anyone seen sharing drinks would get kicked out; nonetheless, I managed to get quite drunk without paying a thing.

Anaïs

There was a lot of cocaine floating around, which I had only really encountered on this trip in Bocas del Toro (where a good proportion of dollar bills would come complete with blood stains). I’ve always thought coke is a mug’s game, and it’s particularly un-fun to be around people using when not partaking, so I tended to clock off fairly early most nights, which had the benefit of leaving me pretty much hangover-free all week. One nineteen-year-old girl made me chuckle when she turned down an offer with the following: no thanks, I’m waiting until I’m 25 and my brain is done developing.

I tried to buy a ukelele from a shop up the road, but had to return it shortly after as the tuning threads were busted. I spent most of my time during the day laying in any of several hammocks with a perfect view out over the bay; however, it was still phenomenally hot and even laying still in the shade brought out the big sweats.

I also received an email during this time about my action camera, promising me my choice of various accessories in exchange for filling out a survey. Every single thing about the email screamed sketchy to me; I used to make IT security e-learning courses, and it looked exactly like the kind of demonstration phishing email we would use in them:

Screenshot by the author

Nonetheless, I couldn’t really work out the angle unless the survey also asked for my bank details, but to be sure I emailed Akaso directly to verify it: they said it was legit, so I went ahead with the survey. Even the confirmation page seemed very odd:

Screenshot by the author

However, shortly after I heard that my requested pack of accessories had arrived at home: thanks, Akaso! I also found out that I had been put on the reserve list for a job in Antarctica I had applied for back in January, which was exciting, but did present a further delay on my ability to make any plans post-return to the UK.

Photo by the author

I extended my stay by another night so that I could join everyone on a Sunday trip to Water Cay, a small islet only reachable by boat. Pretty much everyone from the dive shop was going, and we lugged along a whole BBQ and plenty of food (and, more importantly, drink). The cay itself was pristine Caribbean white sand, and we had a jolly old time. I remember hearing a song playing about papaya which, as a recent papaya convert, obviously appealed.

Emma Skegg

The 19-year-old decided to give coke a go after all, and then spent the rest of the afternoon complaining that it wasn’t having an effect. Later, after we’d returned to the dive shop and she and a 30-odd-year-old dive instructor proceeded to make out in the middle of the seating area, I discovered that the half-your-age-plus-seven rule wasn’t as universally-held as I’d always assumed; I’m sure there’s a correlation between people who have younger sisters and people who adhere to it.

Guatemala ¶

I had originally intended to spend much more time in Guatemala. My parents had travelled there before I came along and they had given me several recommendations, but in the end I only had about a week to spend between my course in Utila and my planned activities in Mexico. I decided that of all the places I had heard about, Lake Atitlán sounded the most my speed: beautiful, relaxing and with a good variety of different towns and hikes to explore.

Journey to the Lake ¶

My original plan had been to leave Utila on the Sunday, return to San Pedro Sula and catch a shuttle from there to Guatemala City, where I would then make my way to Atitlán by chicken bus. However, part of my decision to stay another night in Utila was due to reading about the dangers of bus driving in the capital. Ultimately, I decided that I was happy swallowing the booking cost and getting another route there. So, on the Monday I found a shuttle going direct from La Ceiba to Antigua Guatemala, and hopped on.

I was only in Antigua for one night. I stayed at Volko Party Hostel, but I must’ve missed the party because it was pretty quiet. The building was cool though, with an upstairs terrace bar complete with hot tub (itself complete with a mysterious pair of pants laying off to the side). I found a great restaurant called Rinconcito Antigüeño that served big portions of local food on the cheap; the second time I went there all the tables were taken, but an American–El Salvadoran lady beckoned me to sit with her and we had a nice chat.

Photo by the author

Having just gone from a low of -40m to a possible trip high of 1,500m, the weather was markedly different and (after Hotduras) incredibly refreshing. I also encountered my first portrait bank note, which I thought was cool because I’m the kind of guy who knows what ’numismatics’ means.

Photo by the author

As I sat waiting for my shuttle to Panajachel to arrive the following afternoon, I realised with 10 minutes to spare that I’d accidentally booked it for the wrong day. Thankfully, I banked on the reliable Latin American lateness and flexibility, sending off a WhatsApp message to the booking company to ask if the shuttle was still in town and could pick me up today. Not long after, I was on my way to Atitlán.

Atitlán ¶

I had booked a cheap hostel (Hostal Dulce Sueños) in Panajachel, the largest town on the lake, for three nights. My plan was to stash my bags there and make excursions to the other towns; the price was cheap enough that I wouldn’t mind paying for a glorified storage locker if I decided to stay elsewhere. As it went, I arrived in the midst of the first downpour I had seen for some time, moments after two other girls who were sharing my dorm. We went out to do some shopping and cooked up some food back the hostel, and I ended up making plans with one of them to go to San Pedro La Laguna the following day to hike up San Pedro.

I also looked through the Wikivoyage article for the lake, complete with helpful one-line summaries of many of the towns to help indicate which I might want to visit: San Marcos, for example, sounded like primo crystal dipshit territory, but some of the tiny villages like Jaibalito sounded interesting. I also learned about a charitable hospital in Sanitago Atitlán that both offered volunteering options and tours. Fresh off from Cuba, I was intrigued to see what healthcare looked like in other places, so I contacted them and arranged a tour.

Photo by the author

As we crossed the lake on a very flimsy-feeling lancha, it was clear that San Pedro would be a bust: the top of it was covered in cloud, as were all the other high peaks in sight. I suggested that we should get off instead at San Juan La Laguna and head up to the viewpoint there, which was one of the only spots that looked to have any visibility. We did, and it was incredibly sweaty, but the views were pretty great.

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

We debated whether we wanted to continue climbing up to the Indian’s Nose, but given that I would be spending the night in Santiago Atitlán and had no spare tops with me, I decided against it. As we descended, locals passed us carrying stacks of cinderblocks on their backs using cloth straps tied around their foreheads; they rather showed me up as I had been panting most of the way up whilst carrying precisely zero bricks.

We walked along the road to San Pedro, and spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly through the town, taking interesting-looking side streets largely at random.

Photo by the author

Panajachel hadn’t appealed to me much, but as we meandered through San Pedro the vibe started to click for me. Between the verticality of the largely-improvised construction, the thick crowds and the omnipresent tuk-tuks, it felt more like what I imagine south-east Asia to be than anywhere in Latin America. My pal introduced me to horchata and agua de Jamaica (i.e., cold hibiscus tea) as we waited for the last lancha back to Panajachel, and then I headed further on to Santiago, where I stayed in an otherwise-empty B&B.

As I walked back from dinner, I heard a commotion ahead. Outside what had previously been some sort of large-scale BBQ, whose smoke had billowed out into the narrow streets and half choked me on my way to get food earlier, there now stood three flatbed trucks, each piled high with speaker systems, drummers, little kids in elephant costumes and more. Everyone wore matching yellow t-shirts with a picture of an elephant on.

I walked on by and saw a woman closing the metal shutters of her shopfront. Wanting to doublecheck that things weren’t about to get spicy, I asked her ¿que es eso? and pointed back at the peculiar parade of pachyderms.

Político, was all she said in response.

One thing I noticed whilst walking around Santiago Atitlán was the lack of police presence, compared to the other similarly-sized towns around the lake like San Pedro and Panajachel. It turns out that, following a massacre in 1990, the Atiticos kicked the Army out of the city and instituted their own means of maintaining security and order. In this 2010 article it says that they were discussing doing the same thing with the police, so perhaps they went through with it in the end. I’ll be spending a lot of time with radical Mayans in Mexico, but it was interesting to see that a similar thing had occurred here, and that I had never heard about it before.

The following morning, I explored Santiago a little. I checked out the colonial Catholic church, which hosts a shrine to (and the heart of) Stanley Rother, the former priest who had been killed after defying the right-wing death squads. I then set off in search of another Santiagan religious icon: Maximón, the patron saint of ‘banging your wife whilst you’re away’. I asked the B&B owner if she knew where he was, and she sent her daughter to take me to the place he had been the previous year. They gave me a vague direction and I headed in it, eventually encountering an old man standing around waiting for something. I asked him if he knew where I could find Maximón, and he led me through a winding series of narrow alleyways. I did think that this might be a dumb idea on my part, knowing the violent crime rate in Guatemala, but I was also easily twice the size of the man so figured I could probably hold my own if it came to it.

Photo by the author

In any case, he took me to the shrine and I stepped in. The air was thick with incense and I watched as someone finished making their benediction to the strange, tie-clad figure. I offered some money, and the attendent slipped it in behind the ties. After taking a blurry photo with my potato of a camera, which struggles in low-light conditions, I headed back out to fresh air, gave the old man some change for his help and set off for the Hospitalito. I considered jumping on a tuk-tuk, but the weather was temperate enough that I decided to take the scenic route and walk. This turned out in my favour when I had the chance to get an incredibly sweet breakfast from a small café called Casa de las Granizadas; it only cost me a quid.

Hospitalito Atitlán ¶

Hospitalito Atitlán is a non-profit private hospital that primarily serves the Mayan community that make up the overwhelming majority of people in Santiago Atitlán and the surrounding rural areas. Many are deeply impoverished, and so the hospital aims to provide treatment for all who need it, regardless of ability to pay. The hospital was initially set up by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma, and Stanley Rother (see above).

Photo by the author

The tour started with a video summarising the history of the hospital. The video’s well worth a watch if you have fifteen minutes, but the short version is that the hospital and the Mayan communities it serves weathered the brutual 30-year-long civil war—during which government forces burned many villages as part of a scorched earth strategy and conducted a campaign of genocide against the Mayans—and the subsequent economic turmoil only to be wiped away in a 2005 landslide that killed hundreds.

With donations from the local community and overseas donors, a new building was constructed in a new site, identified as safe from future landslides. Currently they serve around 1,000 patients per month with an almost entirely Guatemalan staff, supplemented by specialists from overseas volunteering their time and expertise.

There are several services on offer, from orthopedics to pediatrics, plus an emergency department. Some specialities are only available on certain days: the opthalmologists were in today carrying out eye surgeries, so we couldn’t look around the operating room.

The five regularly-offered services had an office each; this was the paediatrician’s:

Photo by the author

One of the key focuses of the hospital is reducing infant mortality. Guatemala has the highest rate amongst under-5s in Latin America, and around 50% of children are malnourished. This is the maternity ward:

Photo by the author

Apparently the Mayan custom is for expectant mothers to stand up and walk around a lot to relieve strains, so the maternity wards open directly into a maternity garden for perambulatin’. A large number of births here take place at home, so the hospital has done a lot of community outreach work to win over the comedronas, or traditional local pregnancy assistants (think more ‘doula’ than ‘midwife’) so that they will be more willing to send people in need to the hospital.

I talked a little about the Mother and Infant programme we had learned about in Cuba, because I am now a qualified expert on it. My guide told me that the patients they tend to see tend to skew young; he said they didn’t see many cases of conditions like polio, but mainly diabetes and early-onset COPD. The former he attributed to recent changes in lifestyle from more agrarian to more sedentary following the rapid growth of the city following the end of the war, whilst the latter he blamed on the face that Mayan women spend much of their time cooking inside smoke-filled kitchens.

Photo by the author

The Mayans are apparently a bit skeptical of modern medicine, so the hospital also has a garden round the back where they grow plants and herbs for use in traditional medicines. Coincidentally, Cuba is doing something similar, though for very different reasons: it needs to lean on alternative medicines for which the ingredients can be grown locally because the blockade means they struggle to import medical supplies and equipment.

Photo by the author

There were a couple of dogs knocking about, one apparently older than the building itself. We looked at the staff board and my guide pointed out one of the doctors who had come from Cuba, which probably shouldn’t have surprised me.

My guide told me about the outreach work the hospital does, from its dedicated community social worker to ongoing first aid workshops delivered by a pair of retired American paramedics. He also told me about the hospital’s paramedic scholarship scheme, and about their current plans to build a training facility for nurses.

Photo by the author

The whole thing was designed to be environmentally sound, which means it’s designed to let a lot of natural light in and temperature control is managed by natural ventilation: the upper levels are open to the air, and it has none of the aseptic hospital smell one may expect. It’s easily knocked the Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital (NSEC) off of the top spot of my ’nicest hospitals’ ranking (though I do still have a soft spot for NSEC’s spaceship port design and matching sci-fi-looking uniforms). On the roof are 600 solar panels and some sun heaters for providing hot water.

Wouldn’t you know it, I happen to have read the NHS’ Delivering a Net Zero Health Service report (no, I’m not sure why either) and we had a little chat about efforts underway in the UK.

Photo by the author

I was also shown around the hospital’s warehouse area, and spoke to one of the guys working there, who was about to finish a degree in paramedicine thanks to the aforementioned scholarship programme, about pre-hospital care in Guatemala; the hospital’s ambulances are for transfers, and Guatemala follows the old US system of dispatching firefighters to medical emergencies.

Most trash in this area of the world is a) thrown on the nearest patch of floor or b) burnt. I asked what happened to clinical waste from the hospital, so they decided that must mean I was a weirdo and wanted a tour of the hospital bin stores. He also showed me the hospital’s collection of literature, covering topics ranging from managing diabetes and healthy recipes to childcare advice, all translated into the several Mayan languages present in Santiago. At the end we discussed volunteering opportunities for a computer scientist with the world’s most electic CV. I definitely want to come back to Guatemala and Atitlán when I’m next in Central America (to hike the lake’s circumference, for one) and helping the hospital seems like an ideal excuse to do so. Watch this space.

Off to Mexico ¶

I headed back to Panajachel for the final night. I had thought about visiting some of the really small villages on the way, but decided against it as I wouldn’t have had much time to spend there, and I would much rather come back and give them a proper go some other time (and the same goes for Guatemala as a whole; I don’t really feel like I’ve been there yet).

At 5am the following morning, I hopped on a shuttle heading to Mexico. It was a small minibus and was, unlike my luxurious ride from Honduras, full, meaning I had to snatch some sleep wedged in between someone else and the window. When we arrived at the Guatemala–Mexico border we went through passport control, and then just… waited. For about an hour, and nobody seemed to know why. Eventually, we set off, whereupon I learnt that we wouldn’t be taking the same shuttle (unlike every other border-crossing trip I’ve been on), and so I had to rush back to grab my stuff before they set left; in the rush I left some snacks and my SNTI baseball cap behind.

As I returned to the border, the group had gone. Flustered, frustrated and not really knowing where they had gone, I stepped across into Mexico and hoped I wasn’t about to illegally immigrate again.

Cuba is a compelling, confounding and wildly contradictory place. Depending on who you are or who you talk to, you may hear that it’s an authoritarian hellhole, a tropical socialist idyll, both or just about anything in-between. I’ve been alluding to eventually visiting Cuba since the very beginning my trip, and I’ve finally made good on that: I was eager to see the reality for myself, to try and separate propaganda from reality and to hopefully learn a thing or two about that messy interface where ideals meet reality.

It turns out I had a lot to say, but if I were to attempt a pithy one-line summary, for an Anglocentric audience at least, I’d say this: imagine if Britain fended off the Luftwaffe at the Battle of Britain and waited a few years, but then the invasion of France just… never happened, and instead the country lived under the Blitz for six decades and counting. If that’s satisfied your curiosity then congratulations, you can have your afternoon back. Otherwise, read on.

This post will be a little different to the others in this series. For one, it will be Long with a capital Jesus, Ben, sometimes less is more; at just over 30,000 words (excluding appendices) it is more than half the length of a Ph.D.  thesis, and there are around 500 links, so don’t overlook the table of contents off to the side (or above, if you’re on a mobile device). There are several reasons for this length: The Brigade itself was two densely-packed weeks of fascinating and often challenging educational explorations, political discussions that would run into the wee hours of the early morning and at least one dancefloor punch-up. As such, there’s a lot to get through, and that’s before I even get to my extra week in Havana or lingering questions that I’ve been grappling with ever since leaving, or new ones that have been raised as I’ve continued to research the topic. On those latter points, expect this post to contain more mini-essays and digressions than usual, and for many paragraphs to end with question marks, rather than full stops.

Secondly, whereas I usually don’t directly attribute quotes in these reports and leave out most people’s names, I don’t generally follow any hard or fast rules for this. However, given the politically sensitive nature of this trip and the increasing levels of political repression back in the UK, I will be applying the Chatham House Rule much more strictly in this piece, except for public figures and those Cubans named in the CSC’s own report.¹ Also, I’m writing this up from my notes over a month later, so any direct quotations should be considered potentially paraphrasal, not least because most of the speakers were talking in Spanish.

Background ¶

I went out of my way to find a way of visiting Cuba that would be political, rather than just laying on sunny beaches and knocking back Havana Club. But why, and from what angle, was I so keen to visit?

Why Cuba? ¶

Akala first piqued my interest in Cuba. I was reading his Natives against the backdrop of the 2020 George Floyd protests and, in a chapter entitled Why Do White People Love Mandela? Why Do Conservatives Hate Castro?, he related the following:

The first foreign country Mandela visited upon release from prison was Cuba, where he met and shared a podium with Fidel Castro, a man he referred to as my brother and my president.

This came in the personal context of my own politicisation, which I plan to write more about elsewhere but which we could perhaps say had started in earnest two years earlier and was turbocharged during the pandemic. I was questioning a lot of my prior conceptions of the world and actively seeking out information that would challenge these. However, I don’t think I had ever really thought much about Cuba before this. I had a vague image of Castro with his beard and military fatigues and that he was some sort of dictator, and something something communism, but nothing beyond that. But now I was intrigued.

Time passed, until I found myself gearing up to head to Latin America for the better part of a year. I hadn’t thought much more about Cuba since 2020, but now that I would be heading to its neck of the woods I decided it was time to swot up. I started with Manufacturing the Enemy: The Media War Against Cuba. From the introduction onwards, the book was eye-opening. For example, this quote:

One of the most consistent anti-revolutionary propaganda is the attempt to demonstrate how far advanced Cuba was economically and socially before Fidel Castro took over and supposedly ruined everything. The media and anti-Cuba experts point to areas such as education and health care to try to substantiate the country’s failures under the revolution.

What is missed is comparative data. The benefits of the country’s social programs were in the vast majority enjoyed by those living in Havana and Cuba’s other urban areas. In the countryside, they were virtually non-existent before the revolution. Fidel Castro’s movement was aimed at changing that dynamic, to try and provide those in the rural regions with similar community assistances. To erase the urban centric attitude of a government official who stated: Havana is Cuba, the rest is landscape.

Bolender then cites a comparison of pre-Revolution Havana with the rest of the country, which I think is well worth quoting here in full:

Sixty per cent of physicians, 62 per cent of dentists, and 80 per cent of all hospital beds were located in Havana in 1956–57. There was only one hospital in rural Cuba. Four out of five workers in the countryside received medical attention only if they paid for it; as a result most had no access to health care. Infant mortality averaged 60 per 1,000 but that figure was reduced by more than half in Havana. In 1958 there were approximately 6,000 doctors in Cuba for a population of seven million. An estimated 50 per cent left in the first year after the revolution following the new government’s order that doctors had to be redistributed throughout the country. To replace the loss Cuba built three new training schools by 1962. By 2006 there were 70,000 doctors for a population of 11 million, almost all with one or two specialities. In 2010 infant mortality had fallen to six per 1,000, on par with American statistics. Life expectancy in 1959 was 59 years; in 2006 it was 75. In all of Cuba, the number of hospitals has risen from 57 before the revolution to 170 today, plus 250 polyclinics (health centers), previously unknown; beds available in hospitals and clinics have doubled, from 21,000 to 42,000, from 3.3 per 1,000 inhabitants to 5.4.

Bolender adds that:

Before the revolution, 23.6 percent of the Cuban population was illiterate. In rural areas, over half the population could not read or write and 61 percent of the children did not go to school. To address this problem, Castro asked young students in the cities to travel to the countryside and teach the people to read and write. Known as the Literacy Campaign, the 12-month program started in early 1960 and involved hundreds of thousands of students. By its end, Cuba had a literacy rate of 99 percent of the population.

The whole book was like this, countering the freakishly consistent media line from the US press; regardless of an individual outlet’s supposed political leaning, they march in lockstep on this issue.² He traced the use of the same tropes regarding Cuba all the way back to the time of the Spanish–American War, a time when the US was more open about its imperial ambitions. I also learnt that Cuba hadn’t originally declared itself Marxist–Leninist, and only moved into the Soviet sphere of influence after being frozen out of any alternative by the US:

Soviet-style socialism was never a political aim in Cuba: it was seen as a means of saving the revolution, whose first goal was national independence. Under those conditions, the struggle goes on, with or without socialism.

In addition, whilst the US continues to claim that the Cuban government never reimbursed the owners of land and property that was seized after the Revolution, this was not for lack of trying on the Cubans’ part:

When it became apparent that the American side had no intention of negotiation, the revolutionary government accelerated nationalizing property (regardless of what foreign entity owned it) with little regard to reparations. However, by the 1980s, compensation for nationalized properties belonging to all non-US countries had been settled.

There were all manner of startling quotes, some of the most astounding coming straight from the mouths of US politicians. For example, a 1960 memo.  from some State Department ghoul on the original motives behind the blockade, namely denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government. And also this from President Kennedy himself:

I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.

Around the same time I also read Chomsky’s Rogue States (which includes the evocatively-titled essay Cuba and the U.S. Government: David vs. Goliath), binged the podcast series Blowback and watched an explainer of how their electoral system works. I now knew that something really interesting was going on in the Caribbean, and I needed to get myself to Cuba. But how? And, more importantly, how could I get there in a more political capacity?

I initially tried contacting the University of Havana, who I’d heard offer month-long Spanish courses, but my emails bounced. Whilst looking for options, I discovered the UK-based Cuba Solidarity Campaign (CSC). As luck would have it, they run a May Day Brigade to Cuba every year for young trade unionists. As young in the UK trade union movement can mean up to 35 years old that wasn’t a problem, but I’ve been union-less³ since I quit my last job back in mid-2022. But, after some discussions (and getting a UK-based friend to phone their office because my emails weren’t getting through) I was on board, and at a highly reduced rate since I didn’t need the flights from or back to the UK.

Ben, the Anarcho-Trotskyist CIA Agent ¶

So, I had established my interest in Cuba, and I had found my in, but from what perspective would I be coming? For the precise definitions I am using for the various bits of political terminology, see the relevant appendix.

I am intentionally woolly about my own politics. A politics pal of mine once called me a horrible floating voter, though years later he had settled on defining me as some kind of anarchist. I’ve always found precise political labelling to be an exercise as unedifying as it is distracting, and at its worst it can become dangerously prescriptive. I don’t think a healthy mind selects an ideology and then queries it when making decisions, people just follow their beliefs and intuitions (or what they think will benefit them) and eventually the resultant behaviour forms patterns that can reveal their underlying motivations (perhaps even to themselves). I just say and do what feels right, try to constantly question myself and present my working wherever possible; I will leave the ideological classification problem up to my future biographers.

But I do understand that that can be unsatisfying. For one, any Marxists in the audience will be uncomfortable with not knowing which box to put me in so that they can then denounce me for being in that box. And everyone knows one can’t be taken seriously in the political arena without regurgitating a load of books at people first, so here are my theoretical bona fides: I’d not call myself a Marxist, or an anyone-ist for that matter,⁴ but I appreciate some of Marx’s method and disagree with other parts. I think the base and superstructure concept and the theory of alienation are solid; I think the more teleological or predictive parts are clearly not borne out by history since he was writing. I’ve not directly read the scriptures beyond the Communist Manifesto (though Capital and Eighteenth Brumaire are on my to-read list), but I’m familiar with a lot of their contents through secondary sources. I studied Rosa Luxumberg and the Spartacists way back at school along with Russian history from Tsar Nicholas I to the death of Stalin,⁵ and I went out of my way to visit the memorial to Kurt Eisner whilst passing through Munich last summer. I’ve read some bits and bobs of Lenin, and occasionally he manages to stop being a histrionic weirdo long enough to produce something valuable like Imperialism. Other writers I’ve read who tend to appear under the Marxist label include Franz Fanon, Fredy Perlman, Mark Fisher, de Beauvoir and Sartre, plus related post-colonial authors like Paul Gilroy and Achille Mbembe, though I’m sure there are many more that I’m neglecting, or that I don’t think of as Marxists.

I personally think communism sounds pretty neat, even as I doubt that it is achievable on a large scale, but I’d be perfectly happy with a system in which people are able to pursue it locally if they want to and aren’t hurting anyone inside or outside of their communities. I’m against authoritarian socialism in principle and I think that Marxism–Leninism specifically—don’t you see, the beatings are for your own good!—is an idea so absurd that only an intellectual could believe [it]. Of all of its variants the ones that tend to end up doing the least harm (e.g., Titoism) seem to get called Trotskyist, so I guess that’s my preferred strain, but don’t mistake this for support of Trotsky; he deserved every inch of that icepick for his work in Kronstadt. There is a certain idealistic tragedy to Trotskyism, though. Marxism–Leninism is a fundamentally bad idea that goes horribly wrong pretty much every time it gets attempted, and Stalinism and Trotskyism represent the two possible responses to this that don’t require one to re-examine the underlying philosophy: simply deny that things are going wrong or that all the death and destruction is great, actually; or say that this example doesn’t count because of whatever reason, but the next time will surely be different. Or, put visually:

Image by the author, top cartoon by K.C. Green, bottom images by the BBC

I do plan to try and properly articulate my own politics (and, perhaps more interestingly, how they have developed over time) in a future million-word, twenty-appendix blog post. For now, suffice it to say that back in 2014 I eighteen years old, listening to Pat the Bunny, reading Emma Goldman and calling my views something akin to anarcho-communism. Between 2014–16 I was reading more CrimethInc. and exploring post-left anarchism, before deciding that fishing food out of dumpsters forever didn’t appeal. In 2018 I tried to describe what I now know is an organicist position, arguing in favour of confederalism as the only system of association that could reflect this.⁶ Around the same time a combination of me leaving university to become a real human being, a couple of relationships, reading the exquisite Letters of Insurgents and, most importantly, encountering the Kurdish Freedom Movement led me to a new appreciation of my own politics, and over intervening years I’ve further explored both that movement and related ones (e.g., the Zapatistas of southern Mexico) and sought out more practical activities.

Philosophically I’m an absurdist, and I take a lot of moral cues from Camus’ postwar humanism. Ethically I’m generally deontological in my approach.⁷ Politically I suppose I’m currently best described as a democratic confederalist or communalist, and one could broadly lump me in under the banner of libertarian socialism, but most important to me is that I identify myself as being firmly within the without adjectives camp; the anti-authoritarian streak has always been present in my thinking, even when my understanding of how best to achieve this have changed. That all said, I’m not so doctrinaire that I can’t recognise that some states are preferable to others.

As a result of all of the above, though, I rather stood out amidst the rest of the Brigade. Most of the Marxist–Leninists correctly identified me as an anarchist (but made it sound like a slur) and a couple decided I was a Trotskyist; I think that’s tankie for dick. Thanks to my US citizenship and weird Nicaraguan origin story,⁸ the one thing that everyone could agree on was that I was clearly working for the CIA.⁹ But, whilst I am not certainly not ideologically aligned with the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) and I think the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is as bad as any other,¹⁰ I am always happy to talk with anyone, no matter how much we disagree; I believe in separating a person and their ideology, and I can point to a lot of instances where maintaining connections and friendships across seemingly-irreconcible differences of opinion has proven beneficial in the long run. I’m also unrelentingly catholic when it comes to my choice of sources, and perpetually curious; I enjoy the thought of finding out that I’ve been wrong about something and the thrill of new information far outweighs any embarrassment I might have felt at having been wrong to begin with (or, perhaps, having lacked nuance).

So, consider this piece as one of reportage and rumination, not propaganda, from a source openly sympathetic to the goals of the Cuban political project, but also primed to be sceptical of the Cuban government (as with all governments) and cautious not to be made a useful idiot.¹¹ Wherever possible I have tried to find sources to back up the claims that I heard made, as well as counter-evidence or potential caveats that I think are worth noting; the absence of a link does not necessarily mean the claim is incorrect, but only that I was unable to independently verify it.

The Brigade ¶

After a 16-hour bus ride to San José, a night spent sleeping in Juan Santamaría International (or trying to sleep, to be more accurate), two flights and another 5 hours in José Martí International—the most boring airport terminal in the world—waiting for the rest of the brigade to arrive, here we all were, ready for two jam-packed weeks of revolutionary politics and cuba libres.

Photo by the author

Our delegation of 50-ish trade unionists (plus me!) hailed from all across the UK & Ireland, representing industries ranging from transportation to healthcare and included a mix of union staff, workplace reps ¹² and rank-and-file members. On the political front I think everyone was some kind of (state) socialist, maybe some of them were also communists, and there were perhaps 10–15 avowed Marxist–Leninists of some stripe or other, including around 8 card-carrying Communist Party of Britain members.¹³ There was definitely a sizeable contingent of not-particularly-radical brigadistas who were mainly there for a Caribbean holiday, and more power to ’em. All of the brigadistas, even those with whom I had major political difference, were fine company, and after months of barely seeing a Brit this experience has confirmed my belief that we are objectively the funniest people in the world.

The XVI Brigada Internacional Primero de May in total brought together over 300 delegates from 29 different countries, representing every single continent bar Antarctica. The Yanks had the largest presence in total, split into a few delegations, but we were the second-biggest group. Whilst this was the sixteenth May Day-specific brigade, international solidarity brigades have been coming to Cuba every year since the ’60s.

Photo by the author

We kicked off the Brigade at the Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), part of Cuba’s impressive domestic biopharmaceutical industry, with a floral tribute to Jose Martí and a few rounds of ¡viva!s—these would become a recurring theme, and eventually a running joke. After filing into a lecture theatre under the watchful gaze of a slideshow of Fidel Castro photos and words like revolutionary, humanist and absolute ledge, we heard from CIGB Director Dr Marta Ayala and Fernando González Llort, President of ICAP and one of the Cuban Five. There was a comment in memoriam for a recently-deceased South African activist, which prompted a (communist) rendition of My Mother Was a Kitchen Girl. We were told about the fuel shortage currently wracking the country,¹⁴ due to which we had had to abandon our initial itinerary and the Julio Antonio Mella International Camp in favour of staying in hotels within Havana; we were also told that due to this, the traditional large May Day celebrations in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, which usually saw millions of Cubans bused in from around the country, had been reduced to a number of smaller, localised celebrations.¹⁵ The meeting ended with a recital from a young, though very impressive, violinist from a local school.

Lectures ¶

Our time in Cuba began with three consecutive afternoons of lectures, each following a morning of collective agricultural work. I will deal with the former here, and the latter later on.

The Economic Situation in the Country and the Impact of the US Blockade (Gladys Hernández) ¶

First up was Gladys Hernández, Researcher at the Havana-based World Economy Research Centre (CIEM), talking to us about the current economic situation in Cuba and the continuing impact of the now 61-year-old illegal US blockade of the country.

Hernández acknowledged that Cuba was currently facing, perhaps, the biggest crisis of [its] history. This came in the context of an international economic crisis (or, as she called it, multicrisis) caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine (which supplies 80% of the world’s grain), and of course the COVID-19 pandemic. What made Cuba’s situation different to other countries’, though, was that most countries aren’t under a blockade, which had been intensified by Trump with 243 new measures in the midst of the pandemic. As a result, inflation in Cuba hit 70% in 2021, though it was now down to the mid-40s;¹⁶ the economy shrank by 10.9% in 2020, and growth dropped below 2% in 2022, compounded by Cuba’s worst-ever fire at a vital oil storage facility in Matanzas and the devastation caused by Hurricane Ian making landfall. As a result, the government had had to reintroduce measures not seen since the Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cuba also has its eyes trained on threats further over the horizon, such as preparing for the impacts of climate change.

There was some positive news, however. President Biden repealed a handful of his predecessor’s new measures (though most remain in force). Cuba had seen the lowest COVID-19 infection rate and case fatality rate in all of Latin America (0.37% compared to 1–1.54% in the rest of the world). Cuba had seen only 8,530 deaths from the disease, and has achieved a 98% vaccination rate compared to 94% in the developed world and only 6% in the developing world, which includes children in the world’s first such programme.¹⁷ The pandemic had been bad, she acknowledged, but Cuba now had a lot of international prestige from its domestically-produced vaccines and low infection and death rates.

And whilst they had not yet hit their target of 2m tourists for the year (down from a pre-pandemic annual number ~4.7m), 1.7m had thus far come to the island. To support this, and a 18% annual growth rate in tourism, hotels had been built at a breakneck pace: there were now 300, compared to only 57 in the ’80s, though I’m unsure if she was talking about the whole country or just Havana. We want tourists to come back, Hernández said, and told us that the bulk of the previous year’s visitors had been from Russia; obviously, this proved to be a basket best not filled with all of one’s eggs.¹⁸ Cuba had recently signed an memorandum of understanding with China aiming to strengthen tourism co-operation between the two countries.

She then took on the claim that Cuba’s economy is dependent on remittances sent home from Cubans abroad, highlighting that these bring in a little over $2bn per year and claiming that they were important, but not vital, in the face of a total GDP of $107bn (though they are apparently the country’s third largest source of foreign currency, after medical internationalism and tourism, which helps to explain the damage done when Trump-era sanctions resulted in the closure of Western Union branches across the island; these were amongst the handful of new restrictions that Biden has since repealed).

Hernández expressed her frustration at the US’ reinstating (in the final few days of Trump’s presidency) of Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, this country that has done so much for the world. She also criticised those who claim that the government does nothing for Cubans, highlighting the 1.5% unemployment rate,¹⁹ recently raised minimum wage²⁰ and representative nature of government (more on this later); I like our popular government, she said, saying that it was composed of ordinary Cuban men and women. This was all particularly frustrating, she added, because the US and Cuba have much to discuss, highlighting issues of illegal immigration, drug trafficking and the threats posed to the Caribbean by climate change.

Hernández then explained the changing makeup of the Cuban economy, particularly the growing non-state sector, pointing out that micro-, small- or medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) represented 29% of employers within the country in 2022; the remaining 70% were state enterprises.²¹ This is certainly impressive, given that they have only been permitted since 2021,²² but she did not mention the domination of the military in an estimated 40–60% of the foreign exchange sectors of the economy. There is a law currently under discussion that would raise state wages, which would allow state employers to be more competitive with the higher-paying private enterprises. She recognised that communist countries in Asia (e.g., Vietnam, China) had been successful in adopting measures to encourage their state agencies to become world leaders, and that this was an example that Cuba was keen to follow.

She also addressed the 2021 protests that had shaken the country. Thousands had taken to the streets with a cry of DPEPPDPE, but Hernández claimed that there were only a handful of actors operating in bad faith, whilst the majority were just confused and understandably angry about the ongoing energy and food crises.²³ She said that, in response to the unrest, the government had instigated transformation programmes in around 2,000 of the most-deprived barrios in the country, including 66 in Havana alone, to address the accumulated needs of the people. We don’t want you to think that Cuba has no problems, she stated, but we will face them.

She closed by telling us that this was perhaps the most important brigade, and that we must be [Cuba’s] messengers. Cuba doesn’t publish everything about the good that is going on in the country,²⁴ she said, adding (somewhat menacingly, to my ears) that there is a need to educate [Cuban] media to better promote the achievements of the government. She then said that the global balance of power is currently shifting drastically: 60% of international financial transactions now take place in US dollars, down from 78% 10 years ago;²⁵ the introduction of the euro in 2002 had provided a valuable alternate foreign currency; and Russia’s exclusion from the SWIFT network would likely startle many others into accelerating efforts to build an alternative (though she thought that China could probably never be removed in the same way). In this context, Cuba had recently rescheduled its debt payments to the Paris Club and Russia, having gone into debt²⁶ to fund development processes (which she said is not the same [as going] into debt as a fascist dictatorship, though I’m unsure what exactly she was referring to; I can’t find anything to suggest that fascist dictatorships are particularly prone to debt forgiveness). Hernández stressed that we were never forced to accept terms we don’t agree with, unlike with the World Bank,²⁷ and we believe debts must be repaid.

The Legislative System in Cuba and the Latest Laws Adopted (José Luis Toledo Santander) ¶

Our second lecture was on the topic of the Cuban legislative system: how it works; its composition; and its recent activities. It was delivered by Dr José Luis Toledo Santander, ANPP deputy for the Plaza de la Revolución municipality since 2018 and chairman of its Commission for Constitutional and Legal Affairs, whilst Gerardo Hernández Nordelo (another member of the Cuban Five, and also a deputy) moderated.

Toledo Santander began by highlighting the intense lawmaking activities currently underway within the Assembly, saying that 35 laws had been passed in the previous session alone.²⁸

In April 2019 they had adopted a revised constitution, following a three-month nationwide consultation and referendum. 135,000 meetings were held, and Cuban exiles were invited to participate. Three printings of the draft constitution sold out, and one author describe[d] Cuban citizens attending assemblies with annotated copies of the draft, demonstrating their level of engagement. Toledo Santander said that the vote saw a total of 7.85m votes cast out of a total voting population of 8.7m,²⁹ for a turnout of 90.15%, and that the 90.61% that voted in favour therefore represented 78.3% of the total voting population.³⁰ The new constitution reaffirmed that the Communist Party of Cuba … is the superior driving force of the society and the State which organizes and orients the communal forces towards the construction of socialism and its progress toward a communist society. It also reaffirmed that that country is governed by a socialist economic system based on ownership by all people of the fundamental means of production as the primary form of property as well as the planned direction of the economy; in Toledo Santander’s words, the Cuban economy recognises the market, but doesn’t let it go wild.

The new constitution defines seven types of property, and Toledo Santander highlighted the key ones as being private property, personal property and property owned in a joint venture with the state; he provided the example of a house, stating that this would be personal property (and pointing out that some 85% of Cubans are homeowners), but would become private property if it were rented out. He said that the MSMEs were a mixture of private enterprises and joint enterprises with the state.

He also highlighted that the new constitution guarantees human rights, as it declares that human dignity is the supreme value that underpins the recognition and exercise of the rights and duties enshrined in the Constitution, treaties, and laws and also that the Cuban State recognizes and guarantees to a person the non-renounceable, indivisible, and interdependent enjoyment and exercise of human rights, in correspondence with the principles of progressivity and nondiscrimination. However, words alone do not mean much—the North Korean constitution also claims that citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration and association, for example—and Toledo Santander specifically has been accused of approv[ing] laws that violate constitutional rights and of being a defender of the anti-constitutional theory that the magna carta cannot establish guidelines for the Communist Party.

He contrasted the political structure of the government now to how it had been under the previous 1976 constitution, which had introduced the election of delegates to the newly-constituted ANPP, which was the supreme authority of the state. These delegates received no salary, were non-professional and met for two sessions per year, plus any extraordinary sessions (of which there had been 4 in the past year, Toledo Santander said). The position of President of the Council of State was introduced and made the head of both the state and the government. Since the new constitution, the head of government is now the Prime Minister of the ANPP, and the head of state is now the newly-created post of President of the Republic, currently Miguel Díaz-Canel. This change came about, said Toledo Santander, because Cuba wanted a president with powers, but not presidentialism, and so it created a semi-parliamentary system in which the President recommends a candidate for Prime Minister, who is then appointed by the ANPP, and likewise for the members of the Council of State (the real day-to-day governing body in the country).

Cuba is divided into 168 municipalities, which are grouped into 15 provinces. Prior to 2019, local government was conducted by Provincial Assemblies, but it was found that they slowed down the system, so they were abolished in favour of new provincial governors and deputy governors, along with a provincial council to which they are accountable. In municipal elections, the people of the municipality recommend candidates (between 2–8 per ballot), who then need to win 50% of the vote (plus one) to win, and elections are re-run if that threshold is not met. The new constitution also introduced municipal mayors to replace the old system in which one person headed both the legislative Municipal Assembly and the executive Administrative Council, which left them overstretched. Governors and deputy governors are elected by Municipal Assembly delegates. Toledo Santander added that Cuba does not have a constitutional court, and so responsibility for ruling on constitutionality is left to the ANPP.

He then moved on to the recently updated Código Penal. Under the new code, he said, no-one can make a statement to the police without a lawyer, and the police must provide public defenders. He spoke of a long-standing desire to reduce pretrial detention times that had finally been realised though the granting of a right to go to court to challenge one’s detention; habeus corpus is now part of the constitutionally-guaranteed rights. Criminal hearings are public in Cuba as a holdover from the Spanish system, and this has been strengthened in the new Código Penal. In addition, the administrative silence has been recognised as an infringement on the rights of Cubans, and public bodies can now be censured for acts of omission as well as commission. New types of sentences had been added that included weekend sentences of community work, and there was a new mechanism for early releases.

He did not at any point address the hundreds still imprisoned following the 2021 protests, nor persistent allegations of forced disappearances³¹ and torture;³² Cuba ratified the UN Convention against Torture in 1995. His only addressing of the domestic authoritarianism practised by the Cuban government was to quote Aquinas, saying that if a castle is under siege, all dissent is treason.³³

Most relevant for me, and perhaps only me, was that the new Código Penal was preceded by Cuba’s first bespoke data protection law. Toledo Santander didn’t go into further detail here, but a cursory look online suggests a legal regime not too dissimilar to that of the GDPR, complete with a distinction between personal and sensitive data, defined bases for lawful processing, data subject rights, though there seem to be fewer of such rights and the exception to requiring consent to access someone’s data when done so for reasons of general welfare, public order, and national security is likely not subject to any of the (admittedly imperfect) scrutiny as in other jurisdictions; I have noticed that Cubadebate, which the BBC say has become something of a sounding-board of public opinion on the island in recent years, is not available over HTTPS.

Toledo Santander went on to complain about the media criticising the new Código Penal for not reducing the number of crimes that merit a death sentences. He said that the number had not increased and that the Cubans were enemies of the death penalty in principle,³⁴ stressing that there had been no executions carried out for a decade and that state policy is to maintain it only for exceptional circumstances; the 1997–8 hotel bombers had not been executed, he pointed out, and nor had a Miamian who assassinated a Municipal Assembly president.

He addressed a couple of other important laws, old and new, such as the recently-passed Food Sovereignty and Security Law and the post-9/11 Law against Acts of Terrorism; he didn’t elaborate further on either, but the latter does have a rather interesting introduction:

This Law is founded upon the deeply held ethical and political convictions that have always inspired the Cuban Revolution, and represents an expression of our determination to reject and condemn, by means of specific legal measures, the methods and practices of terrorism.

Moreover, the people have Cuba unquestionably possess the moral authority to do so because they have been victimized by such crimes for over forty years and because, despite the high costs of the deaths and injuries suffered by thousands of Cubans, as well as the tremendous moral prejudice and property losses inflicted on the country, Cuba has always dealt with these losses with legitimate resources and not through war which, by its very nature and outcome, is also a form of terrorism which Cuba strongly repudiates.

Lastly, he addressed the recently-passed update to the Código Familia, which he said does not impose any one model of the family, but rather tries to protect all family types; 66.85% voted in favour of the revisions, on a turnout of 74.12%. Much of the international coverage has focussed on the new Code’s legalisation of gay marriage through its redefinition of marriage from being between a man and a woman to being between two people, the reforms go far beyond that to encompass gender equality, the rights of gender, sexual and relationship minorities (GSRMs) and surrogacy; Toledo Santander said that the latter had been a particular struggle, as there were fears that legalising it would lead to people selling their babies, and so safeguards in the final version include the requirement that the people must be related to one another, a court must approve it and any doctor who conducts the process irregularly will be stripped of their medical license. The Código Familia has been hailed as being among the most progressive in Latin America. Vital in the success of the campaign was the support of Mariela Castro: Raúl Castro’s daughter; current director of the CENESEX; and the first (and, as far as I can tell, only) person in the history of the ANPP to vote against a piece of legislation.

Closing, Toledo Santander admitted that he do[es]n’t live in a perfect system and that we know people’s power is not a finished job, but we are the first so we are always learning. He also stressed that the Cubans are always happy to listen to what our friends tell us, and that they have learned that solidarity does not mean to beg, it means to share what you have.

The Media, the Disinformation War on Cuba and the Role of Social Networks in Defence of the Revolution (Michel Enrique Torres Corona) ¶

For the final lecture, we heard from Michel Enrique Torres Corona, Director of the Nuevo Milenio publishing house and host of Con Filo counter-propaganda television program.

Torres Corona stated that Cuba is subject to an information and media war, more so now than ever before following the boom in online media, as a result of which the war has acquired new features. Con Filo was created a few days after July 11, 2021, in light of the violent protests which he said were the result of the peak of the pandemic, combined with regular blackouts and a frustrated population. However, he alleged that there was also a large media drive against Cuba, such as the claimed hijacking of the popular pandemic hashtag #SOSCuba; this was an attempt, he said, to tr[y] to sell an image of a country in shambles, not a home, which got into people’s minds.

He said the Foreign Minister of Cuba had held a press conference regarding the hashtag, claiming that it represented algorithms and money; others have said that this is at best an exaggeration, and as with most Internet operations it will likely never be possible to confidently attribute responsibility. Torres Corona further minimised the protests, arguing that whilst books on regime change say you need to keep unrest going for at least a week, July 11 only lasted 24 hours. He claimed that the Revolution was never really in danger, but [July 11] was a before and after in our perception. They realised the threat of social media disinformation and that one can defame and attack anyone over digital networks with no consequence except maybe banning (emphasis mine, given the intense repression faced by independent journalists in the country). Before July 11, he said, there had been a difference between online toxicity and toxicity on the streets.

Cuban media, he said, realised the need for a space where people could compare the things that they are seeing, and Con Filo was the result. It has several social media accounts, though some have been blocked; I was able to find YouTube and Facebook profiles, but they appear to have been namesquatted on Twitter by someone retweeting anti-government messages, which is quite funny.

He said that Con Filo had three objectives:

1. to counter media campaigns against Cuba (i.e., mentioning that there is a fuel shortage but not mentioning the US blockade;
2. to promote digital literacy; and
3. to communicate information about the Revolution.

On the first point, Torres Corona cited an article he had read that claimed that Cuba was the poorest country in Latin America, which ignored Haiti.³⁵ He said that the media try to keep people in a state of constant rage, giving the hypothetical example of an angry guy who has a bad day at work, then gets home to find that there is a blackout; this guy is already in an optimal state of rage, and then he goes on his phone and sees disinformation that tries to keep him there. He confessed that the most difficult part of countering fake news is countering stories that contain elements of truth.³⁶ He is clearly aware of this in his own work; for example, this episode features footage of people challenging a US State Department spokesperson over Cuba’s presence on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, including this absolutely exquisite squirm:

Questioner

Based on your previous response, I was wondering if you are saying that any government that commits any rights abuses deserves to be on this list?

Spokesperson

…I'm not going to, uh, parse the specific parts of the participation on this list or not. Your question was about [proceeds to talk about something unrelated]

In the episode, Torres Corona then goes on to recount the lengthy and violent history of US-backed terrorism against Cuba. The US barely needs help to look bad, particularly in the context of Cuba, and this is a much more effective piece than just dismissing the July 11 protests out-of-hand as having been foreign agitation. The show is also chock-full of Internet memes.

On the second objective, he told us how Cuba has gone from a country with no Internet to one where people connect all the time in just five years, from little Internet to 4G. He singled out CiberCuba as a particularly active misinformation campaign that preyed on Cubans’ digital illiteracy, as they don’t now how to protect their data or avoid scams. The first step, he said, was to instil a discipline of suspicion, which would help to dull the impact of manipulated images and AI-generated audio and videos (the former of which they addressed in an episode entitled El rostro del fascismo); in the future … we must be suspicious of everything.

Regarding the third objective, Torres Corona talked about bringing in historians and suchlike who have influence, but only amongst academics and challeng[ing] the myth that everyone online is anti-Revolution, saying that we have made emerging groups visible. He also mentioned a pro-democracy group called Archipelago, led by playwright Yunior García, who had planned a series of marches in November 2021. Torres Corona proudly recounted how the Con Filo team had clashed with them, showing their links to external backing, and arguing that you can’t exercise a constitutional right against the Constitution. They had also challenged the idea that García is an honest activist, and had countered reports that he was missing in prison and being tortured by releasing footage of him alive and kicking in a Spanish airport a long way away and safe from what he kicked up. This is all a very unsavoury way of describing García being surrounded in his home and prevented from leaving it to join the marches, and then choosing to flee into exile rather than facing imprisonment; this is no doubt why there was some controversy around Torres Corona being invited to be a keynote speaker at an academic Cuba conference in the UK last year.

Torres Corona went on to talk about Con Filo’s work reporting on campaigns around new laws and political events happening in the country. He highlighted an episode of the show—Nos vamos para Miami—about a recent Cuban–American baseball game. He said that the episode showed people the faces of hatred and fascism, including people in US shirts insulting the Cuban players.

He said some some had criticised Con Filo for publicising counter-revolutionaries, but he claimed that even people who don’t agree with communism, when they see those people, those dark anticommunist figures in Miami, they turn against them. He stressed that we do not do research or do reports, we just try to counter the misinformation narrative. He said that any country can have weeks or days or unrest, citing the gilets jaunes in France, but the news stops referring to them quickly. July 11 is still being talked about. Only one person died,³⁷ there was no lethal force³⁸ or tear gas, yet we are presented as a repressive dictatorship.³⁹ He acknowledged that people are thinking beings with different opinions, not all opposed or all for, and we need dialogue, he said, though this was rather at odds with his treatment of Yunior García. He said that being objective is better in the long run, it will make us more persuasive, and said that we don’t want to just make propaganda.

In the Q&A, someone asked about election interference and its role in the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Torres Corona responded that we must not be against tech. , and the Bolsonaro won because of fear and xenophobia. Hitler had done the same thing, he added, long before social media. In response to another question from one of the Ghanaian delegates, he said that we have Cuban doctors in Ghana in places Ghanaian doctors wouldn’t want to go, and then paraphrased an African proverb that says until rabbits learn to write their own story, the tale of hunting will always glorify the hunter. In another question, about how one determines how many reporters to produce each year in a planned economy, Torres Corona stressed that he was a propagandist, not a journalist, though I’d be intrigued to know what he thought the different was in Cuba. He also commented on the high quality of Cuba’s journalistic education, saying that some people take that training and choose to work for the counter-revolution.⁴⁰

Concluding, Torres Corona thanked anti-government rap groups with US links; one member of one had been filmed asking for an invasion of Cuba which was great, we just played that all the time. He contrasted the contemporary Cuban exiles in Miami with José Martí and Fidel Castro, who were both exiled for a long time, but [who] spent it plotting their return. Cubans, he said, are educated on moral authority. The exiles are not courageous or willing to sacrifice, unlike Castro and the guerrillas; if they were courageous, they would be revolutionaries.

Tour of the Revolution ¶

We spent the rest of our time being bused to and fro around Havana (with a police motorcycle escort, no less) for numerous visits. This began with three mornings of agricultural work, the first two at the CCS “Arides Estévez Sánchez”.

Photo by the author

The urban farm—named after a revolutionary, Army officer and co-founder of the Communist Party of Cuba who was killed in the line of internationalist duty by an anti-tank mine fighting in the Angolan Civil War—is part of the internationally famous Cuban urban farming movement, of which Monthly Review has said:

Cuba’s achievements in urban agriculture are truly remarkable—there are 383,000 urban farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables with top urban farms reaching a yield of 20 kg/m per year of edible plant material using no synthetic chemicals—equivalent to a hundred tons per hectare. Urban farms supply 70 percent or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in cities such as Havana and Villa Clara…

No other country in the world has achieved this level of success with a form of agriculture that uses the ecological services of biodiversity and reduces food miles, energy use, and effectively closes local production and consumption cycles.

We helped out with the work, planting corn, weeding plant beds and more. I ended up acting as translator between the president of the farm and several of the brigadistas, who wanted to know more about his life and work. When one asked him how many hours he worked, he said that he worked about 8 hours per day, 7 days per week and had done for 14 years.⁴¹ We asked if he enjoyed it—if he was a campesino feliz, in my translation—and he said yes; we asked if he ever took holidays, and he said he sometimes went home to spend time with his wife and children, though often they came to see him at the farm and stayed over. But he did say that he loved coming to the farm to hang out with the other members, who seemed to form the bulk of his social circle, and he had travelled a little to the Dominican Republic for work purposes.

Photo by the author

For the third day, we visited the much larger UEB Latin America, which takes products from other farms and processes them. We planted more things, cleared more fields and prepared herbs for use in pharmaceuticals and alternative medicines. We were told at the end that we had performed several months worth of work in only a few days, so it seems enough monkeys and enough typewriters really can do more good than harm.

One afternoon we visited Toitico Producciones, a social centre and after-school club that provided young people with music and dance lessons, English classes and more. The kids there put on a show for us which was certainly entertaining, but some Latino music should absolutely not be danced to (not to mention twerked to) by seven-year-olds.

We later visited the Psicopedagogical Center “La Castellana”, a center dedicated to caring for those with neurological, physical and social impairments. We watched another performance from the service users and then had a tour, seeing the products of their art therapy workshops (including big cardboard vaccines). Many of the brigadistas, particularly those working in education and care, marvelled at the low staff to user ratios, community integration and life-long care. We followed this up with a visit to the Center for Neurosciences of Cuba where they presented some of their recent research on Alzheimer’s in the warmest room in the world; as a non-neuroscientist and very sweaty boy, I can’t say I took a lot in.

Photo by the author

We also visited Industria Electrónica Empresa “Camilo Cienfuegos”, a factory that produces many domestic electronics products. Here we heard from the SNTI about how unions work in Cuba, providing social services as well as workplace representation to their members,⁴² as well as some of the difficulties faced by the business due to the blockade. The union head talked about how emulación socialista promoted competition between workers and improved productivity, though he didn’t tell us who the Cuban Stakhanov was. The director of the factory told us that they were the first industry in the country to be fully powered by renewable energy, and said that a hard year for the country has come to an end [but] perhaps others shall come. We were led around a showroom of products produced by the factory, where I took the opportunity to ask how many hours the workers here put in: 8 hours per day, Monday to Friday, which explains why the place was so empty on the Saturday we were there. I can’t help but feel the farmers are getting shafted on the work-life balance here.

In the Q&A session I asked the following, in Spanish because I was getting fed up with the recurrent language barrier issues:

I’m Ben from England, I’m a computer scientist and free software activist. It’s easier to download a file than to import something, so does Cuba make use of and promote the use of free software and open designs, for example chips using RISC-V architecture, 3D printers, etc.?

The key takeaway from the response was finding out that they use GNU/Linux in the factory; I later found out that they’ve even rolled their own distro.  called Nova, based on Ubuntu. That’s pretty cool.

That evening, we headed to the Casa de la Amistad for the much-awaited International Night! Everyone had been lugging around beers, jars of Branston pickle, Fray Bentos pie tins and more since leaving the UK, but we were finally able to lay them all out on the table for the delectation of the other delegations. I helped flog the wares for a while, mostly so I could keep an eye on the various ales that had been included; I made sure to help myself to some much-needed free samples. We were certainly one of the most popular stalls—the Yanks had only brought political literature, and had shown up too late to get a table—but our primary cultural contribution was probably getting the teenage-looking waitstaff very drunk on Jameson; I hope they did us proud by picking up a bag of cans at the local offie and drinking them in a park later on.

Photo by the author

The food and drink were but one part of the culture sharing: there was also a performing arts element. Most delegations went for songs and a couple for poems, whilst the Yanks performed some embarrassingly serious slam poetry about how they aren’t really American and we should stop calling them that. The MVP was probably the old Andalusian guy who stood up on his own and belted out a song. But, soon enough, our own time came. And then the skies opened. Undeterred and highly inebriated, the lot of us clambered up on stage and unfurled our flags as almost all of the audience fled under cover (though not the Communist Party of Ireland guys, who boldly sat in the rain cheering us on because they’re real Gs). Then, dripping wet, we proceeded to belt out (and occasionally forget the words to) Viva la Quinta Brigada and There is Power in a Union. We left the stage, paused for a rousing chant of Lizzie’s in a Box and proceeded to earn our reputation as the trashy delegation that has the most fun. I’ve never been so proud to be British.

Then, to cap off our time in Havana, we visited the Centro Fidel Castro Ruz, a museum and library dedicated to the famed revolutionary who led the country between 1959–2008. Hosted inside a gorgeous house (that had been requisitioned from the American socialite who originally owned it after she fled following the Revolution), the centre features all manner of Castro bits and bobs, from his favourite AK-47 to a pair of boots he once wore. I’ve always found museums dedicated to a single person a little weird, and this was no exception, but there were some really cool exhibits, such as one in which cylinders could be plucked from a map of the world and placed onto a table to reveal a breakdown of Castro’s interactions with that country.

However, whilst we were basking in Fidelismo a violent storm struck Havana, leaving parts of it heavily flooded; on our coach ride back we made waves driving through several of the larger puddles and saw someone wading down the road in water up to their waist. We were later told that the May Day celebrations scheduled for the following day had been cancelled as a result, and there was many a disheartened brigadista to be found in the hotel bar that night.

Photo by the author

We spent what would have been May Day wandering around Havana Viejo instead. A group of us headed over to the Plaza de la Revolución so that everyone could get some photos in front of Che’s big head, and I heard that someone from another delegation had taken a taxi there early in the morning just to make sure that the parade wasn’t still going ahead and we were just being kept away; who says tankies are paranoid? We stopped at a few pleasant but unmemorable (though quite expensive) bars and visited the Feria de Publicaciones y Curiosidades, where I picked up a copy of Castro’s History Will Absolve Me and we lost another brigadista for several hours as he tried to haggle them to within an inch of their lives on various tchotchkes and knick-knacks.

In Your Own Time, Go On ¶

The organised trips were certainly interesting, but the real highlight of the trip was all of the unscripted interactions that took place during our downtime. It was during these that we were able to talk to ordinary Cubans, members of other delegations and one another. I think it is important here to mention that we had complete freedom of movement during the whole brigade, with no hard requirement to attend any of the programmed visits and no register-taking. In the evenings we were completely left to our own devices, as well a couple of afternoons that had been put aside for us to wander Havana Viejo and Trinidad. Brigadistas routinely headed into Havana, had candid discussions with normal Cubans and saw some more of the realities of life in the country first-hand. In this I am glad that I did not come straight to Cuba from the UK and have instead spent 7-odd months in Central America recalibrating my sense of comfort, because I heard remarks from some brigadistas who I think interpreted some of the things they saw as signs of uniquely Cuban poverty, whereas I’ve come to regard them as common to the whole region; having to put toilet paper in the bin, for example, or ramshackle houses made of bare cinder blocks with corrogated sheet metal roofs.

All of this is for me perhaps the single most compelling piece of evidence to counter the common narrative of Cuba as just another authoritarian state. The organisers clearly had enough trust in both us and the Cuban people to leave us to explore freely and, from a practical standpoint, the ability to go off-script at any time means that it was not possible to have stage-managed our experience; Potemkin villages are no use when the people you’re trying to impress can walk right up to them. We even got to experience the famous healthcare system as an on-call doctor stayed in the hotel with us for the duration of the Brigade, and later more acutely when one of our brigadistas injured her ankle and was whisked away to hospital for an X-ray and cast, at no cost and with minimal crowding in the waiting room; our brigade paramedic, who had accompanied her, was suitably impressed.

The Internet was also interesting to experience. There are a handful of US media outlets and independent blogs that are banned by the Cuban government, but Internet censorship is by no means as pervasive as in places like China. The only issue I heard about of a brigadista being unable to access something (unsurprisingly, we don’t generally read Cuban dissident blogs or US media outlets) was when they tried to submit some university coursework and were unable to access the portal for doing so; this seems to have been a result of US sanctions, though. Cubans used common social media sites freely, and we even saw an ice cream parlour with a ring light setup for filming TikTok content. The US government seems to be a bigger threat to Internet access in Cuba than the Cuban one.

Also relevant is that there were no restrictions to us using VPNs when accessing the Internet, so whilst actually getting online could certainly be a pain in the arse those with the technical means were generally able to access everything they wanted, and my Internet traffic will be of little use to any Cuban spooks listening in. Unlike China, where VPNs are generally illegal and using one can get one in trouble, in Cuba they seem to be widely accepted (though, of course, treatment of us tourists and the normal Cubans may vary) and we even had speakers directly point to them as vital for bypassing US restrictions, for example when accessing scientific papers.

Lastly, whilst Cuba is statistically a very safe country, we did encounter a few issues. One pair of brigadistas ended up in a hairy situation when a Cuban who had been showing them around the city invited them into their home, before threatening them into buying something. Another time the pair tried bringing a friend they had made in town back to our hotel, but the security wouldn’t let him into the lobby: it’s not clear if this is because of a risk of crime or because they didn’t want us to fraternise too much, but all of the hotels in downtown Havana had doormen who I assume fulfil a similar function.

Prostitution is also semi-legal and very visible in the tourist areas, but the oddest thing were the jinteros: they’d strike up conversation by asking you where you were from, and then ask if you wanted to exchange money, or buy drugs, or procure prostitutes. A couple of the more persistent ones would walk alongside you for a bit or put a bit more effort into building rapport first, and the most dedicated guy I encountered completely changed directions and walked with me for about five blocks, also advising me on which restaurants to eat at, asking if I wanted to go for dinner with him and, when all that failed, switching tack and asking me to give him money to buy a pizza. It was all very surreal and, irritatingly, you couldn’t just filter out where you from?s because just as many random Cubans would also ask that out of curiosity and not follow it up with anything. I’ve been in Latin America for a while, in places as poor if not poorer than Cuba, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

Cubans on Cuba ¶

Many brigadistas reported Cubans complaining about the shortages, as expected, but also some interesting comments about how it’s impossible to succeed without being involved with the Party. One reported that they were unable to start a business if they wanted and that there was no scope for entrepreneurship within the country’s system; this would seem to run counter to the recent proliferation of MSMEs, but it may be that there are other hurdles to overcome, such as lack of access to the capital to start a new business in the first place.⁴³ One brigadista reported that someone had told them he was waiting for the first opportunity to leave the country. Other travellers I’ve met on my wider trip have related similar stories, with one having been told that the Castros are the most corrupt family in the island.⁴⁴

The government line would no doubt be that these are all CIA agents who just happen to be posing as taxi drivers and the like, or (more charitably) that they have been misled by online disinformation.⁴⁵ Both of these dismissals are, I think, silly and even self-defeating; there is a lot of evidence to suggest that open democracies have a major advantage in responding to crises, due in part to the speed with with issues can be identified, different solutions proposed and debated and implementation monitored. Perhaps more importantly, people need a pressure release valve and they need to vent. But whilst repression of dissent in Cuba is well-documented, the willingness of ordinary Cubans to share their thoughts with us does suggest that they individually feel fairly safe to do so, although we can’t discount that we as foreigners pose far less of a risk of reporting them to the authorities than their fellow countrymen. But perhaps general dissent and criticism is mostly tolerated, up until the point it starts to look like a movement.⁴⁶

Also, without wanting to invalidate the critical views expressed, I don’t think anyone expects the average Cuban to go on and on about the Revolution and the wonders of socialism to the same extent as the political and industrial big-wigs that we were hearing from in the organised part of the tour.⁴⁷ Most people are not ideologues, and most people don’t really care about politics in an abstract sense: they want food to eat, safe water to drink, healthcare for when they get sick or injured and the promise of a better life for their children. And here we have to acknowledge the famous David Foster Wallace line about fish in water:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, Morning, boys, how’s the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, What the hell is water?

What I mean by this is that Cubans live, and in most cases have always lived, with a social safety net that most people in the world can only dream of. The hedonic treadmill is real, and it must be easy to lose sight of that in the context of one’s (very real, very legitimate) complaints. So amidst the other comments, there were also people who complained that the much-vaunted Cuban healthcare system was corrupt because, if you wanted to get seen quickly, you have to bring the doctor a sandwich. And whilst it may be difficult to start a new business, one does not have to worry about becoming destitute if it fails, as 20% do in their first year of trading in the UK.

This all makes it hard to disentangle their complaints about the specific system under which the country operates from the kind of complaints one would expect to find in any poor country (or, for that matter, any country at all). Out of 216 countries, Cuba is ranked 69^th in nominal GDP, 89^th in GDP (PPP) and 113^th in GDP per capita. But, as Helen Yaffe has pointed out:

Even factoring in its low HDI per capita, the Human Development Index (HDI) lists Cuba in the high human development category; it excels not just in health and education, but also in women’s participation and political inclusion. Cuba has eliminated child malnutrition. No children sleep on the streets. In fact, there is no homelessness. Even during the hungry years of economic crisis of the 1990s, Cubans did not starve. Cuba stuck with the planned economy and it enabled them to ration their scarce resources.

I want to conclude this section with two further complications. First, I don’t want to suggest that everyone we spoke to was wholly negative. I struck up a conversation with a guy in a hole-in-the-wall food joint who said he loved living in Havana, largely due to the party scene, as well the bookseller working at the Feria de Publicaciones y Curiosidades (though he was trying to flog Soviet tat to gringos, so he may have been incentivised to big up the socialist paradise angle). However, I do think that the majority of Cubans we spoke to (if I include both people I talked to and conversations related by other brigadistas) were critical. Second, we spent most of our time in Havana and, per that quote I mentioned earlier, the difference between the city and the country can be stark in Cuba. It’s possible that those Cubans living in the capital were better-off than those in more rural areas, but at the same time it is also possible that those campesin@s would be more grateful to improvements brought to them by the Revolution, particularly if they or anyone they know experienced life under the Batista regime.

Viva la Drinking Brigada ¶

The conversations within the Brigade, and within our own delegation, also provided some fascinating insights into the ongoing issues back home (remember, I’ve been away for the best part of a year, leaving as just about everyone seemed to be going on strike but before the Tories banned effective protest), the differences and similarities between different struggles around the world and some absolutely rogue political takes.

I had a lot of time to pick the brain of one particular (and perfectly affable) raging tankie, but from other conversations I think the conclusions I’m about to draw apply more broadly than just him. I do think that we are broadly trying to do a similar thing—expressing scepticism and seeking out information contrary to mainstream media narratives—but as far as I can tell, he (and others) seem to have drawn the correct conclusion that our own media and government collude and propagandise, but then chosen to respond with complete credulousness towards propaganda from other (in most cases far nastier) regimes. I’m sure he would reply that I’m a counter-revolutionary for not accepting the claims of benevolent workers’ dictatorships at face value, or that the pursuit of objective truth is a bourgeois delusion, and that I am foolish for not treating mainstream media accounts (or, for that matter, reports from Western human rights organisations)⁴⁸ as a priori invalid. But I would say that however much one opposes NATO/US imperialism/etc., the enemy of one’s enemy is not necessarily one’s friend; one can easily have two enemies at the same time.

With many on the Brigade, and certainly my tankie pal, there was also a marked tendency towards whataboutery.⁴⁹ A good example of this was an early conversation where someone asked what I thought about China, which I ended along the lines of genocide is bad. My interlocutor did agree in principle, and then there was a pause, after which he added that the US supporting Islamist terrorists in Xinjiang is also bad. Did the US do that? I don’t know, but it certainly sounds like something they’d do. Is that also a shitty thing to do? Yes. Does that being a shitty thing have any bearing on the shittiness of China’s ongoing abuse of the Uyghurs? No, and neither does the presence of Islamist terrorism whether US-supported or otherwise. The whole idea of crimes against humanity is that they can never be justified by circumstance. Perhaps this is a consequence of the materialist conception of the world, where the role of human agency is diminished in the face of powerful forces of history beyond our control, but whilst it can sometimes be appropriate to establish the reasons that have influenced some decision, the causal responsibility and the moral responsibility for a decision itself are two very distinct things. The tankies certainly aren’t so quick to provide exculpatory context for the dreadful treatment of Muslims by the US, UK or Israel.

As a consequence of my travels I became known immediately as Ben from Nicaragua, at least when people weren’t just calling me Trot or spycop. Quite a few people wanted to know what Nicaragua had been like, and I can’t shake the sense that I left a trail of disappointed communists when I described it as an oppressive dictatorship and told them that that Revolution had been betrayed. Then again, for avid readers of sites like the Grayzone, which for the last couple years has been full of pro-Ortega propaganda, it must have been quite the shock. I think they got over it, though, either by dismissing me as a trustworthy source or by arguing, as one did, that the Sandinistas had never be really leftist to begin with: they were apparently always just social democrats.

We shared our hotel with most of the other European, African and Asian delegations. I’ve been told that our hotel had been under refurbishment when the accommodation plans changed last-minute, and staff were still ferrying in furniture several days into our arrival. Eventually the pool opened up, and we were just down the road from a cluster of beachfront bars. The hotel also put on regular evening entertainment, with the Madreagua dance troupe sharing the Santería religion and other elements of Afro-Cuban culture with us. A video of me dancing with an African love goddess exists somewhere out there, but unfortunately the person who took it never shared it with me.⁵⁰

Of course, there were some interpersonal dramas within the contingent. Most were the inevitable result of throwing 50-odd mostly-strangers together for a fortnight of drinking, but a couple were more political in nature, and thus are of interest to his essay. For the most part the tankies were dismissed as just being a bit odd by the rest of the delegation, but they had a particular beef with one brigadista in particular that I believe pre-dates the trip. The interesting part is that I heard one of them describe this brigadista as having no politics. However, I was also told that that the allegedly apolitical brigadista had successfully unionised their own workforce, and (dare I say it) there may be more productive ways of being political than reading endless theory and casually dropping terms like petite-bourgeois into conversation.

There was also a small Korean delegation sharing our hotel, made up of a bunch of South Koreans dressed in Jeon Tae-il t-shirts and one Spanish guy who was studying at Pyongyang University and dressed in head-to-toe North Korea gear every day. They were approaching things very seriously, inviting other delegations for sit-down talks in the hotel lobby to discuss one another’s political situations and strategies; notes were taken. I somehow ended up as one of our representatives, and it was an interesting chat. They said that professing communism has been illegal in South Korea since 1948 and, whilst the others were indignant about this, I can’t help but feel that if Cuba gets the besieged city allowance then the same must surely apply to someone with North Korea as a neighbour. All of them, South and (honorary) North, were pro-reunification, but their geopolitical analysis was intriguing: they praised former president Moon Jae-in for pursuing peaceful reunification, and felt that the US had scuppered the efforts out of a desire to maintain a vassal state in Asia. They asked us if we thought China was imperialist, and one of our group used a thousand words to say no, at which point they simply replied we do; one Austrian guy who had decided to sit in on the conversation was so shocked that he literally jumped out of his chair and ran around to better hear. The Koreans stated that they felt China was blocking the peace process for the exact same reasons, out of a desire to maintain North Korea as its vassal. China doesn’t want unification, they said, they want North Korea for themselves. The Koreans, as they considered themselves, are pawns.

But perhaps the most interesting conversations were with one of our contingent who I think is the wrongest human being I have ever had the pleasure to talk to, and whose wrongness is archetypical of several issues I’ve noticed across the Left, and certainly amidst this brigade. However, he was uncommonly direct in articulating his wild ideas, and oddly forthcoming about them, which made him the perfect avenue for exploring his (and, by extension, others who are less willing to admit it’s) worldview. But I’ll do that in an appendix.

International Solidarity Conference ¶

At the end of our time in Havana, we attended the International Meeting of Solidarity with Cuba at the Palacio de Convenciones.

Opening ¶

The conference opened with a panel, moderated by President Miguel Díaz-Canel and featuring various Cuban politicos and several international guests, including our own CSC Director Rob Miller.

Ulises Guilarte, General Secretary of the CTC, gave the introductory speech, talking about how the May Day celebrations had been rescheduled to May 5. Díaz-Canel then spoke briefly, saying that the main cause of our problems is resisting, after which Anayansi Camejo, Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, took the stage. She started by quoting Fidel Castro to say that international solidarity with Cuba is on the rise, and that Cuba had a responsibility not just to its own people, but to others who look to it as an example as well.⁵¹

She then lamented the impacts of the US sanctions, asking how much more could be done by our doctors without this blockade? She complained that Cuban businesses were deprived of access to US markets and criticised the listing of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, saying Cuba does not sponsor terrorism, it is a victim of it. She pointed out that the US let the airline bomber live a quiet life in Florida, and she stressed that Cuba does not sponsor terrorism, it sponsors peace; it does not sell arms or do assassinations. She quoted Castro again, from the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, saying what the imperialists cannot forgive is that we are here. She stressed that we want to be equal neighbours with the US.

She then highlighted Cuba’s hosting of the third round of ceasefire talks between the Colombian government and the FARC, and listed several other struggles in which Cuba had intervened: Palestinian liberation; Sahrawi nationalism; the Bolivarian Alliance; US reparations for slavery; and Puerto Rican independence, with her describing Cuba and Puerto Rico as two wings of the same bird. She stressed that Cuba has a firm commitment to the UN Charter, to international law and multilateralism, but would always resist efforts to make everyone follow US rules. The weapons of the Cuban Revolution, she said, will continue to be humanitarianism, solidarity and two other things I didn’t catch. She closed by again quoting Castro: the world has been in solidarity with Cuba … Cuba has experienced what solidarity is about.⁵²

We then broke up into one of five workshops each:

• Anti-imperialist unity against the Monroe Doctrine;
• Young workers;
• Women for Peace;
• Challenges of the Working Class Around the World; and
• What Can International Solidarity Movements Do to Help End the Blockade?

Discussing US foreign policy didn’t seem particularly relevant to me, and I reasoned that the challenges of the working class around the world would be far removed from the challenges for it in the UK (or, for that matter, my own white-collar world of IT), so I went to the final workshop, which appealed because of its practical focus.

Workshop: What Can International Solidarity Movements Do to Help End the Blockade? ¶

Gerardo Hernández Nordelo again moderated, along with the Vice President of ICAP Victor Gaute López. The workshop took the form of a series of 3-minute interventions, mostly scheduled in advance.

First up, the Ambassador for the Sahrawi Republic spoke about how they are the only Spanish-speaking country in the Arab world, as a legacy of colonialism. He pointed out that it was the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the Polisario Front this year, and said that the blockade was better than white phosphorous and bombs being launched against Cuba.

He was followed by a Palestinian activist, who thanked Cuba for providing him a scholarship to study medicine there. He mentioned Khader Adnan, who had died earlier that morning in an Israeli prison after an 88-day hunger strike. He again thanked Cuba for t[eaching] us that the Palestinian cause is one of the most just causes in the world, and for Cuban support … always be[ing] unconditional. He closed by highlighting that this year marked the 75^th anniversary of the Nakba, that there were over 250 martyrs whose bodies Israel had not returned to their families and that 157 Palestinians have been killed this year alone, most between 20–25 years old.

Another speaker thanked Cuba for its support for the Colombian peace process. One of the organisers of the Canadian Che Guevara Volunteer Work Brigade, which has been coming to Cuba for three decades, pointed out that the Canucks were standing side-by-side with the US delegation. He quoted Che, saying that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. An Ethiopian delegate announced that expressing solidarity to Cuba is, to me, a duty. The heads of two of the American delegations delivered a joint statement.

Unfortunately, almost all of the interventions were completely unrelated to the topic of the workshop. Barely anyone had any suggestions for how to work against the blockade; just a lot of warm words. The two speakers who did have something worthwhile to say were one delegate who said that if each of us can convince a couple people to come to Cuba as tourists, to spend money here, we are doing our part to break down the blockade, and then our own Rob Miller who talked about a current CSC campaign, but I’m not clear if this is public yet so I’ll remain schtum. During his intervention, he mentioned that following the passage of the Helms–Burton Act, the EU, the UK and others passed legislation designed to protect their people from any sanctions.

The final speaker was Chris Smalls, founder and president of the Amazon Labour Union, who the Yanks had brought with them on the Brigade. Whilst what he’s achieved is certainly very impressive, and he’s probably one of the most interesting and effective labour organisers currenly active, getting called one of the most influential people of 2022 and the future of labor by Time seems to have gone to his head: he mostly spent the conference drifting around taking photos with giddy Americans and being filmed doing so by his entourage of cameramen; he gave a clearly unprepared speech about why we should all work to unionise Amazon that stood out as rambling even amidst a workshop rife with it;⁵³ and he was dressed like an absolute pillock.

Plenary ¶

We regrouped in the main hall for a closing speech from Díaz-Canel. Unfortunately, all of the seats with live translation headphones were taken by Spanish-speakers who weren’t using them, so after a while I left. From the bits I could pick up, and everything I’d heard over the past week, I was pretty sure I could piece together a pretty accurate idea of what the speech involved: blockade this; viva la revolución that; Castro quotes peppered throughout.

Photo by the author

Some time later, Granma published a translated transcript of the speech.⁵⁴ And yeah, I was pretty much bang on. He started by talking about how in Cuba it’s the workers who are in power, affirmed everyone present’s support for human solidarity … and the causes pursued by the peoples for their true emancipation and quoted the Internationale. He talked about the Monroe Doctrine, he complained about the blockade and he stressed that three processes of participative democracy [the Código Familia referendum, plus municipal assembly and ANPP elections] staged just in the last six months, show the people’s trust in the Revolution, the boundless effort to ensure social justice at its core, and in the leadership of the revolutionary process (emphasis mine, as he didn’t mention that abstention in elections that used to see near 100% turnout has reached record highs).

Later, he addressed criticisms of Cuba’s commitment to socialism:

In difficult times, a lot of people ask: Why socialism in Cuba? Not everyone is prepared to live with an economic straightjacket, which has been opportunistically tightened more than once. This situation is so damaging to Cuban society and families that there are those who say we should give up on socialism.

Why did the Cuban Revolution choose the socialist path to prosperity? Because it’s the only alternative to capitalism; because it’s the best way to give power and the decisions about the country and the future, to the people.

I would have liked to have seen him justify his commitment to specifically authoritarian state socialism, but alas. He then addressed the history of the Cuban Revolution, acknowledging but also challenging its position within the Soviet bloc:

When the socialist community collapsed, and with it COMECON, and the Cuban economy shrank by over 30%, the Revolution grew politically and morally, with Fidel at the helm of a party of unity aware of its strength. The country needed five years to stop the decline and return to some degree of growth. But we grew! That is true socialism.

The alleged Caribbean soviet satellite survived more than the economic and political demise of the European soviet bloc; it survived the ideological disintegration and moral collapse of political parties and organizations it regarded as a role model. We were never a satellite!

He made the very valid point that it is incredible that our ability to develop is constrained by two laws of another country, referring to the Torricelli Act and the Helms–Burton Act, before building to a rhetorically excellent crescendo:

Abandoning socialism after those lessons of history is not an option, because we didn’t choose it at random; we chose it responsibly as an expression of the most advanced universal thinking on social justice.

Socialism is so effective in serving that noble, humanist aim, that even hamstrung, besieged, persecuted by the most powerful empire in history, we could not be suppressed or subdued.

So certain is it that only socialism offers a future of social justice that we believe that to be the primary motive for the blockade; namely, to forestall the success of an anti-capitalist, socialist system situated just 90 miles from the empire!

He concluded his speech with a fun story about revolutionary optimism:

In history, Cuba has been through many situations like today’s, but perhaps the darkest was that experienced during several days by the survivors of the Granma’s landfall. 13 days after dispersing, following the baptism of fire at Alegría de Pío, Fidel met up again with his brother Raúl and four others, in the middle of the night in a out-of-the-way spot known as Cinco Palmas. They hugged each other. Fidel asked how many rifles they carried; Raúl replied: Five. With my two, seven said Fidel, Now we’ll win the war for sure! According to Raúl, at that point he thought his brother had lost his mind. Win the war, indeed!

But astute readers will notice that I have skipped over a big chunk of the speech and, unfortunately, in between those two snippets, Díaz-Canel couldn’t help but trip over his own dick:

We reaffirm our solidarity with Sandinista Nicaragua, its people and president Comandante Daniel Ortega Saavedra; … We favor continued development and strengthening of the close, friendly bonds with Syria, based on respect for self-determination, territorial integrity, rejection of terrorism and of the imposition of economic sanctions by foreign powers or international organizations.

And here the rhetoric of human solidarity and emancipation hit the brick wall of the company the Cuban government keeps: a right-wing dictator, shouted-out-to by name, draped in the tattered flag of a past revolution who now guns down his own youth, impoverishes his people for his own enrichment and denies women the basic human rights that the Cubans keep stressing are an indispensible part of true social justice; and the Syrian regime—which has been enthusiastically running its way through the crimes against humanity bingo card for decades now, which is responsible for torturing to death over 14,000 of its people over the past ten years alone and which is now routinely detaining, abusing and disappearing returning refugees—gets to enjoy close, friendly bonds because of its rejection of terrorism.

Cuba has also long been one of the North Korean regime’s staunchest allies.⁵⁵ Díaz-Canel has been on a jolly to that delightful spot already; I wonder why he neglected to shout them out in his speech?⁵⁶ Cuba, even in its current authoritarian form, deserves so much better than to share space with monstrous regimes like these, and it pains me to see it debase itself like this. Instead, let me close this section with an example of how a truly revolutionary statement of international solidarity can sound:

…we want to tell the people of Cuba, who have now been o­n their path of resistance for many years, that you are not alone, and we do not agree with the blockade they are imposing, and we are going to see how to send you something, even if it is maize, for your resistance. And we want to tell the North American people that we know that the bad governments which you have and which spread harm throughout the world is o­ne thing — and those North Americans who struggle in their country, and who are in solidarity with the struggles of other countries, are a very different thing. … And to the indigenous brothers and sisters of Ecuador and Bolivia, we say you are giving a good lesson in history to all of Latin America, because now you are indeed putting a halt to neoliberal globalization. … And to all the young people of Latin America, that what you are doing is good, and you give us great hope.

Spíritused Away ¶

For the final few days of the Brigade, we headed out of Havana and off to the province of Sancti Spíritus: home to one of the most important sites of the Revolution, some charming colonial towns and perfect beaches.

Che (Hey Hey) ¶

On the way we stopped off at the town of Santa Clara, which holds particular significance for the Cuban Revolution. It was here that the Revolution was won, and it is here that the remains of one of its great heroes were laid to rest.

Photo by the author

We started at the Che Guevara Mausoleum, a sprawling complex comprising a huge statue, a tiled plaza and a mausoleum. Here we took an all-brigade photo, but I’m unsure which of the 300-odd phones it was taken on.

Then we headed into the town to visit the Tren Blindando, which commemorates the Battle of Santa Clara: the decisive battle of the Cuban Revolution in which Guevara and his suicide squad managed to ambush a heavily-armoured train carrying thousands of soldiers of the Batista regime en route to reinforce their forces elsewhere. 340 guerrillas attacked a force of 3,900 and forced their surrender; within 12 hours of the victory, the dictator had fled Cuba and the Revolution was victorious.

We then returned to the Mausoleum, where we queued up to shuffle past the crypt in which Guevara’s remains, alongside those of several of his comrades, were interred following their repatriation from Bolivia in 1997; an eternal flame flickered off to the side. Then we went through the Che Museum, where another brigadista asked me what I thought of the man. My response could be summed as mixed, but I don’t think I articulated myself very well at the time, so here we go for another attempt:

Che was and is three very different things: a man; a myth; and a legend. As a man he was both remarkable and flawed, as all men are. Bimbling my own way through Latin America for the past year, I obviously feel some common cause with the idealistic young middle class boy of the Motorcycle Diaries, who seems an eminently likable guy with a poetic turn of phrase.⁵⁷ As a military tactician he was unusually skilled, as the Battle of Santa Clara (and many other battles besides) can attest. He was clearly brave, often very creative and seems to have behaved chivalrously in battle (at least as regards his treatment of the regular regime soldiers). He clearly deserves the adoration the Cubans lay at his feet; without him, they probably would not have their country. He did a lot of good work post-Revolution, such as the Literacy Brigades, and I respect him for realising that his true calling lay elsewhere after his disastrous attempt to be a banker:

His stint as head of the National Bank … has been summarized by his deputy, Ernesto Betancourt: [He] was ignorant of the most elementary economic principles.

Photo by the author

There are criticisms often made of him that lack legitimacy. Mainstream sources often claim that he was privately racist, or openly homophobic and participated in the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba. However, these claims seem to revolve around a mixture of invented quotations from far-right activists and genuine quotations from the Motorcycle Diaries that reflect his young sheltered rich kid upbringing more than anything, and which he repudiates in the book’s closing passage; his actions fighting against Apartheid, in the Congo and so on serve to challenge this alleged racism.⁵⁸ It’s also often claimed that he was overzealous in the post-Revolution executions of Batista-era officials, but many of these were war criminals by any measure and his personal bloodthirstiness (at least at this point in time) is disputed; to quote Che biographer John Lee Anderson:

During the nineties, when my biography first appeared, it didn’t seem especially noteworthy to readers that Che had served as the fledgling Cuban revolution’s supreme prosecutor, presiding over the summary convictions and executions by firing squad of more than three hundred war criminals of the ancient regime — murderers and torturers, mostly. Two decades on, however, this facet of Che provokes unease in young readers who seem surprised to discover that Che was a flesh-and-blood revolutionary, and that, ergo, he killed people.

However, that does not mean there are not legitimate criticisms to be made as well. For me, the biggest obstacle to hagiography is his growing fanaticism and detachment from reality, which was clearly incipient even in his early days, but which definitely metastasised over time:

Something happened to him [during his time in Cuba]. Yes, he had absorbed many of the unpleasant ideas of [Juan] Peron, but so had lots of people. Such individuals went on with their lives and were not destroyed by an ideology. Politics really wasn’t all that important to Che until he went to Guatemala. There he discovered an ideology which clicked with his underlying beliefs and prejudices, seemed to explain the world and give his life substance and meaning. Che was a fundamentally normal, decent human being who became a slave of a cruel secular religion. His belief system consumed him, forcing him to do things he would not normally do. He made himself hard and fanatical. As his father, Guevara-Lynch stated, Ernesto brutalized his sensibilities to become a revolutionary.

Just after the Cuban missile crisis—the closest humanity has ever come to nuclear annihilation—he declared that if the rockets had been under Cuban control they would have retaliated against any US aggression by shooting the Yankee boats out of the water and firing on US cities;⁵⁹ we can all be very grateful that he was nowhere near the big red button, and it shows the change from the younger man who had sent back a postcard from Japan that read in order to fight better for peace, one must look at Hiroshima. If anything, Guevara’s growing unhingedness gives me more respect for Castro for managing to reign him in quite effectively.

By the time he went to Bolivia to try and provoke revolution without any knowledge of the ground, and having made no effort to forge support amongst the people there, his former military genius had devolved into banditry and nincompoopery; the Bolivians turned him in to the military, and why wouldn’t they? He was an annoyance and a threat that they felt no common cause with, largely through his own decisions. In sum:

Che exemplified the tragedy of a generation: brave, self-sacrificing, passionate, a fighter, yet at the same time, committed to a Marxist–Leninist project that crippled socialism, and set back human emancipation with its contempt for freedom and objectively state-capitalist project.

But where the man Che ended, the legend Che carried on. The Bolivian Army, when they published the photo of his corpse accidentally laid out in a Christlike pose (and later removed his hands for identification, with predictable echoes of the stigmata), scored perhaps the greatest political own goal of the last century.⁶⁰ This, along with Korda’s famous photo, served to guarantee him a permanent place in the pantheon of worldwide revolutionary heroes. As is the case for all historical figures, the flow of time has served to smooth of his rougher edges and leave only a series of his greatest moments. In this way, he can serve as a positive example, and no doubt this legend has gone on to inspire many fine acts. Like all historical heroes, he has become a partially-fictionalised simulacra of himself, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

When I was in Nicaragua, I stayed in a building that also housed an office of the Organización de Revolucionarios Deshabilitados “Ernesto Che Guevara”. One of the Nicas I worked with talked of how Che was an inspiration to him, a warrior and a man who helped us gain our freedom. I didn’t understand this last part at the time as I couldn’t find any evidence that Che had ever been to Nicaragua, or involved in the Sandinista Revolution, but I eventually realised I was misinterpreting two parts of the statement: by we, he meant both the Nicaraguans specifically and the Latin Americans in general, due to Che’s important role in the solidification of a united, anti-imperialist Latino identity; and by helped, he didn’t mean by providing training or engaging in combat, but by the promulgation of his ideas in works like Guerrilla Warfare and giving the people the confidence that they could fight their oppressors, and that they could win. The great irony here is that if or when the next generation of Nicaraguans overthrow their current dictator, many of them will probably be wearing Che shirts as they do so. They won’t be being hypocritical or naive, just as most skaters probably don’t know many details about the life of Andre the Giant; Che’s face has just become a symbol of a vague group affiliation and opposition to illegitimate power, largely disconnected from the flesh-and-blood revolutionary to whom it once belonged.

Lastly, when I say the mythic Che, I mean the way in which the legend Che intersects with Latin American religiosity. This is very much my observation as an outsider looking in, but Christianity here is full of religious icons, be they in small roadside chapels and or in paintings inside every small business, asking for the saints’ protections and blessings. There’s everything from saints that bridge indigenous beliefs and Catholicism to saints who shag your wife whilst you’re away. Within this cultural milieu, I think the image of Che has become yet another holy figure, whose protection can be invoked and who will invariably watch out for the poor and the exploited; for example, in Mexico I saw small businesses with banners announcing their membership in an anti-protection-racket collective, and besides that text was a familiar face.

This legacy is a fitting monument to who Che was, at his best moments, and it would be callous to deny his importance to a people who deserve all the sense of security they can derive from it. It doesn’t really matter that I have my issues with Che the man; we’re barely even talking about the same person.

Sancti Spíritus ¶

We arrived in Sancti Spíritus several hours later, and were welcomed by provincial officials outside the Monumento a los Mártires in the centre of the city. Then we split off into our separate hotels; whilst we hadn’t seen much of the American delegation thusfar as they were in a different hotel to us, here we would be sharing with them.

The following day we visited UEB Genética “Dos Ríos”, where we heard about their collective cattle ranch.⁶¹ Then we headed to the Hospital Provincial “Camilo Cienfuegos”, part of the second tier of the three-tier Cuban healthcare system (which comprises per-town family doctors, per-city polyclinics/hospitals and per-region specialist institutions). We heard from the hospital’s director and the head of its union. They told us about the structure of the Cuban healthcare system, the facilities they had to work with and their contribution to Cuba’s famed medical brigades: the back of the lecture hall was filled with medical staff and he asked all those who had participated in an overseas mission to raise their hands, whereupon they received a standing ovation.

A slight dampener was placed on the situation by one of the Yanks, who kept loudly talking over people asking questions. One of our brigadistas politely asked her to be quiet, at which point she flipped out and kicked off, including grabbing them by the shoulders and attempting to force them to turn back around. Our brigadista (with maturity I doubt I’dve been able to muster in her shoes) moved to another seat rather than escalate the situation, but when her neighbour tried to tell the American to be quiet, she changed tack and started booting off about white people denying black people spaces. Try as he might, not even one of the black members of our own delegation could convince her to stop.

This, it should again be stressed, during a lecture in a hospital as part of a solidarity brigade we are all members of.

Next up we visited one of the neighbourhoods under transformation that we’d heard about in the first lecture, as part of the government’s response to the conditions that it asserts led to the 2021 protests. We saw another performance from the kids and visited the local clinic, where we heard about the Cuban mother-and-child medical programme that provides support for things like routine vaccinations. Then a bunch of the kids hitched a ride on our ancient schoolbus, and we treated them to a cultural exchange:

Later that night we attended a block party in another neighbourhood, put on by the CDRs there. We drank, we danced and had a jolly good time, although Rob did pick a bad time to give a speech (i.e., after we were all rather drunk). A couple blocks away, the Cubans were firing absolute zingers at the Americans.

Photo by the author

The International Incident ¶

We headed back to our hotel and continued the drinking. With one assault under our belts that day, relations between us and the Yanks were strained. Whilst some of our delegation have occasionally let themselves down with respect to the Americans (e.g., booing them when they asked questions in Q&As), the Cubans had been models of hospitality. I think it’s clear that they view the Americans as the most valuable people to get on-side (for obvious practical reasons), and so the Yanks had been getting the best hotels, best visits (e.g., the Latin American School of Medicine and a personal sit-down with the president) and effusive praise every time they asked a question. I think the whole dynamic was best captured when we arrived at the hotel and the Cubans unfurled various flags, including the stars and stripes: a nice welcoming gesture (and probably the only US flag then flying in the whole country), to which some of our group assumed the Yanks had put it up themselves and started talking about nicking it later that night. At least the Cubans seem to know their friends from their enemies, and they are always at great pains to stress that they have no issue with the American people, only the US government.

And so I was very heartened that it appeared we had put aside our differences for a trans-Atlantic dance-off that night. I was sat with my back to the dancefloor, but when I saw one of our brigadistas walk past with a face like thunder, I knew there was something worth watching going on behind me. Sure enough, the dancefloor had descended into chaos, with several people screaming and holding one another back as the lights went up and the music cut out. Things eventually calmed down and the Yanks skulked off to sit in the dark by the pool whilst crisis talks within our delegation continued for several hours.

Near as I can tell, the problems began when one of the Americans took it upon themselves to determine which songs we were or were not eligible to request from the DJ (apparently Kanye West is theirs). She then repeatedly trod on a crutch-bound brigadista’s plaster cast-wrapped foot and nearly started a mass brawl with the immortal line above. Someone (white) told her she was being an embarrassment, so for good measure she retorted that your whole race is an embarrassment. Whilst I spent a lot of this trip running defence for the Yanks amidst the more exuberant members of our brigade, this was the third bizarre incident in as many days, as well as the second time in 24 hours that they had physically assaulted one of our group. Nothing was done about it and, as some of our brigadistas rightly pointed out, brushing the hospital incident under the carpet had all but guaranteed this result.

From what I could gather, the US contingent in the hotel with us was made up of several groups who largely didn’t know one another before coming. There was a core of pretty normal young Cuba solidarity activists who were fine, a small group of older black guys and gals who’d been coming to Cuba for decades who were also sound (and had been sharing some excellent stories; I’d heard suggestion that they may have been former Panthers, which would seem to check out), plus a group from the Black Alliance for Peace in matching t-shirts who I didn’t speak to. On top of this coalition, though, was a small group of unknown affiliation who could perhaps be described as belligerent nutters, racial obsessives⁶² or—and apologies for the tricky political science terminology here—giant throbbing cocks. We heard from some of the normal guys that they had apparently been sidelined by these kooks within their own delegation, and some of our own (black) delegates felt that they were trying to transpose the incredibly fucked-up racial politics of the US onto everywhere else in the world without regard to how the realities differ; how quintessentially American. To top it all off, this explosive coalition was being held together by the pair of teenagers who were the contingent co-ordinators (although no shade to them, the one I spoke to was nice enough and it’s an impressive achievement on both their parts).

May Day, at Long Last ¶

There was no time to dwell the following morning: it was time for us to join the (belated) May Day festivities! Hundreds of people lined the streets and many more participated in the march itself: schools; unions; youth clubs; and more, to which we added our own varied delegations. This was actually my first-ever May Day parade; go hard or go home.

Ruaraidh

Ruaraidh

Cuba Solidarity Campaign

We followed the parade with an afternoon in the colonial city of Trinidad. It was incredibly quiet (I think we were there in the off-season), but even by the high standards of some of the other colonial cities I’ve visited on this trip it was beautiful. We embarked on a walking tour, but a group of us decided pretty quickly that we’d rather sit at a rooftop bar and take in the ambience of the city rather than learn about the origin of the rocks used to build it, so we gave them the slip.

Then we all headed to the gobsmackingly gorgeous Playa Ancón, where the sun was shining and the bars was all free. We all ended up in the water before long and a regular stream of brigadistas carrying armfuls of cuba libres, entire two-litre water bottles filled with beer, or sometimes both kept our thirsts well-quenched. For hours. I can count on one hand the times I’ve been that drunk, and I’m sure by the end of it we were largely swimming in a pool of spilt alcohol, but the aquatic conga lines were well worth it.

Photo by the author

As an odd sideshow, the crutch-basher from the night before made a point of coming up to two of our black delegates (but not, as far as I’m aware, the crutch-bashee) to not-really-apologise for the night before. I then watched her spill her drink all over another of our brigadistas, who had sitting on the steps beside her happily minding her own business. I have no idea if this was intentional or is this person just cannot help being the biggest weapon on the planet,⁶³ but I was pretty astounded by the whole scene.

We returned to the hotel and the drinking continued. Tentative trans-Atlantic dancing resumed again, but the lunatic fringe showed no signs of showing up and the night passed without incident, except that some wag decided to push me into the pool whilst I had my phone in my pocket: one stream of obscenities later I was in my room trying to assess and mitigate the damage to the best of my incredibly inebriated ability. Then I decided that the vibe was gone and the night was over for me.

The following day that same wag donated her own phone to the cause of Ben needs some way to access his boarding pass to leave the country (along with other practical issues that gradually piled up over the course of the morning).⁶⁴ We all headed back to Havana, stopping for lunch en route. Me and the other brigadista who would be staying in Cuba worked the room saying our goodbyes, and then the others set off towards the airport whilst we got ripped off for a taxi to the city.

Alone in Havana ¶

Connectivity in Cuba is difficult at the best of times, but I can hardly think of a worse place to have to rebuild one’s digital affairs. I’ve already had to go through this once on this trip, from the middle of the jungle no less, and this was infinitely more of a ballache. At least that first run had taught me some hard lessons about how I had my stuff arranged that helped to mitigate some of the damage the second time around.

ICAP sorted me out with a hotel room and I had a chance to say goodbye to some of the other delegations, who we hadn’t seen much of since leaving Havana several days earlier. Then they hooked me up with a casa particular to stay in, but it lacked Wi-Fi and the nearest hotel’s connection was incredibly flaky, so I had to move. I looked up other casas on Airbnb and tried to book with one, but I first had to set up an account. Then I had to go through several steps of validation, like sending a picture of my ID, all of which failed for different reasons; I don’t know which, if any, were blockade-related. All of this was taking place as I tried to squeeze their godawful bloated React monstrosity of a site through a slow, temperamental and time-limited Wi-Fi connection, on an unfamiliar phone loaded with stock Android and all the bullshit that that includes.

I eventually messaged a host directly rather than booking through the site and arranged to meet them somewhere. I then nearly made myself homeless by accident when I checked out of my current place and headed across the city, and then I couldn’t find the host and had no means of contacting them. After waiting for half an hour longer than agreed I headed to the nearest hotel, where they told me the Wi-Fi was only for guests and I would have to walk several blocks to the nearest ETECSA store. I must’ve looked every bit as stressed and harried as I felt, because one of the receptionists gave me a Wi-Fi card to use and I eventually managed to link up with my host. I sincerely hope that anyone who works at Airbnb catches a non-fatal but irritating disease that is easily treated if caught on time, but they are unable to book the appointment because their GP’s Web site asks them to provide loads of unnecessary details first; I am pleased that me not booking through the site means that the host got to keep all of the fees they usually take out.

I spent the next several days catching up on work with my lovely, reliable and unlimited casa Wi-Fi connection, and checking out pretty much every eatery within three blocks: shout-out to Los Nardos and its weird fake-indoor-street-façade aesthetic. I also managed to get my old phone to turn on long enough to extract all of my photos and notes before the touchscreen started to freak out; I’m leaving it off now until I’m back in the UK.

Me and the other brigadista met up a couple of times, visiting the famous Hotel Nacional where the service was terrible, but we had a very interesting political conversation, which included at least one mild epiphany regarding my own sense of internationalism and affinity for the Kurdish movement, but that’s a story for another time. Even as someone who’s been to a few colonial cities now, Havana really was something else, and bizarrely the city it reminded me most of was Rome; something to do with the grandiosity and age of its buildings, the sheer number of them covered in scaffolding or hollowed-out and the unexpected ways in which historical artefacts kept cropping up in repurposed form:

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

We met up again on my final day in the city to visit the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, which housed a bunch of very snazzy Bauhaus pieces, followed by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, which had an excellent collection of Cuban art from a variety of periods. The ’50s–’60s were definitely a dull period for Cuban art as everyone seemed to just copy Picasso, Pollock and the rest, but pre- and post-that there was plenty to enjoy,⁶⁵ and I thought some were surprisingly spicy for the political climate in Cuba; perhaps good Party members don’t tend to visit art galleries.

I’ve always been more of a museum guy than a gallery one, and said so: my compa retorted that museums were bad and imperialist, which I didn’t immediately grasp until I realised she was talking about colonial plunderhouses like the British Museum. When I think museum my first thought is the National Museum of Computing near Bletchley Park, which I can’t really see upsetting anyone. We both agreed, though, that portrait galleries were terrible.

Painting by Pedro Álvarez

Painting by José Toirac and Tanya Angulo

Painting by Marcelo Pogolotti

Painting by Gilberto de la Nuez

Painting by Marcelo Pogolotti

Painting by Rafael Zarza

Installation by Lázaro Saavedra González

Installation by Carlos Consuelo Castañeda Castellanos

Painting by Juan Moreira Bencomo

Painting by Marcelo Pagolotti

Painting by Carlos Enríquez

Installation by René Francisco Rodríguez and Eduardo Ponjuán González

Painting by Tomás Sánchez

Statues by Alberto Lescay Merencio

Painting by Flavio Garciandia de Oraá

Installation by Carlos Alberto Estévez Carasa

And, just like that, it was finally time for me to leave. I had a bit of a strange interaction at the entrance to the airport when a guy demanded to know my destination and to see my passport before he’d let me in; I can only imagine that he was on the lookout for Cubans trying to leave,⁶⁶ but I don’t really see what function he served that the check-in agent didn’t already (unless the danger was that the check-in agents worked for the airlines, not the government). Then, because I just never learn, I settled in for another long night of trying to sleep in an airport.

My flight was at 6am, and I still had a load of Cuban pesos to spend. The government have shut down the official exchange points, so it’s not possible to convert pesos back into foreign currency. Unfortunately, despite what the signs on their desks claimed, none of the shops in the terminal were actually 24-hours. I managed to buy a copy of the Motorcycle Diaries (in Spanish) from one woman just as she was closing up, but that still left me with a big wad of notes that would soon be worthless. I found a couple of open cafés that would only take foreign currency and a book shop that had a few books I would have bought, but it didn’t open until 6:30; the woman running the only open shop a few doors down refused to take my money to give to the book shopkeeper when they showed up, and I didn’t fancy serving myself and risking getting arrested on my way out of the country.

In the end I gave about $60 worth of pesos to the cleaning ladies as I was queueing to board the plane, or several times their monthly salaries; how’s that for wealth redistribution?

Conclusions ¶

Photo by the author

My time in Cuba was fascinating, both the organised and the unorganised activities and the discussions I had throughout the three weeks. That is, in part, why this has taken me over a month to write up and why it is so long: I had a lot of things to process, a lot of research to do and a lot to say about my experience. Whatever someone may think of my political perspective, I don’t think anyone could accuse me of being unfair in this report.

So what conclusions have I drawn from this experience? I’ll break each part into its own section below, and whilst each should stand alone they are also intended to build on one another.

Democracy with Constrained Characteristics ¶

Let me state at the outset that I am far from prescriptive when it comes to what is and isn’t democracy. I once derailed a good chunk of my Master’s dissertation learning enough Greek to define a tree traversal mechanism that could be used to argue for giving dogs the vote, for example. In the second chapter of that dissertation, I argued for:

…abandon[ing] common but not-particularly-informative terms such as democracy. Classical Athenian democracy, for example, allowed only male citizens over 30 years old to run for office, making it under this more precise taxonomy an oligo-geronto-androcracy, or rule of the few on the basis of their being sufficiently old and male. Even a modern democracy like the UK restricts certain citizens—e.g., those in prison or under 18 years old—from participating directly, and is thus something of a poly-eleuthero-gerontocracy—rule of most, on the basis of their being sufficiently old and free.

I was by no means convinced even then that the systems of representative practices in the likes of the UK and the US, with their periodic elections and delegation of responsibility, are the one and only means of guaranteeing democracy, concluding that …representative democracy is more accurately described as democratically-elected oligocracy. In the years since I wrote that I have become more and more convinced that the electoral systems of these liberal democracies are in fact a profoundly undemocratic and disempowering force, even without the addition of expressly anti-majoritarian features like first-past-the-post in the UK and the Electoral College in the US. In this I am very influenced by way in which the term democracy is used within the Kurdish Freedom Movement, which emphasises autonomy and mass participation at all levels as indispensable components of a truly democratic society and which often talks of creating democratic modernity as opposed to the current state of capitalist modernity.⁶⁷

All of this is to say that I am primed to appreciate the Cuban democratic project, at least as it exists in theory. The actual process of voting, as I’ve addressed already, seems to be sufficiently secret and non-compulsory (and the Pioneers who traditionally guard the ballot boxes are adorable), though nosy neighbours can be far more of a threat to one’s well-being in an authoritarian state like Cuba than elsewhere; we arrived too late to witness the elections in person, and I would have very much liked to have done so. Many structural aspects of the system seem designed to promote bottom-up representation; for example,⁶⁸ elected Municipal Delegates make up to 50 per cent of the National and Provincial Assemblies [which] ensures that local people are fully part of all governmental bodies and creates strong links between the National Assembly and communities throughout the island. Similarly, people cannot nominate themselves [as candidates for the municipal assemblies], and neither can the PCC nominate: it must be the residents in the ward who nominate the candidates. The deprofessionalisation of the legislature though the lack of a salary and part-time nature of the role is also, to my mind, desirable, as is the ban on campaigning.

However, this only applies at the municipal—i.e., lowest—level, and the Party controls the nomination process for the higher levels of the system to ensure that they maintain control over the actual direction of the state. The membership of the Candidacy Commissions are supposed to ensur[e] that the National Assembly reflects all sectors of Cuban society, including workers from the state and non-state sectors, members of the mass organisations, farmers, nationally known figures from the arts and sports, members of the armed forces, women, people of colour, all age-ranges, and from all parts of the island, but the Assembly only meets a couple times per year, and the Council of State is not quite so representative.

Fundamentally, though, choices within unreasonable constraints are not choices all, and so whether or not one thinks the Cubans have a real say in the composition and working of their government hinges on whether or not one thinks the constraints imposed are reasonable. Because the Communist Party of Cuba is the only party allowed to operate within the country, and despite it’s constitutional ban on being directly involved in elections, it has a hugely dominant role in the political system of the country despite it’s membership only being 700,000 (~6% of a population of around 11m). Despite representing a tiny fraction of the population, Reuters claim that all top level government and military officials are party members, as are most lower-level functionaries, and leaders of labor and other mass organizations, and even a more sympathetic source said in 2015 that 59.24% of those elected are members of the PCC, while 6.75% are members of the Union of Young Communists (UJC).⁶⁹

The only evidence I can find that there have ever been opposition candidates running in a Cuban election is these two guys in 2015 (which the previous source declined to mention, despite its seeming lack of historical precedent).⁷⁰ However, there are apparently other prospective opposition candidates who, it is alleged, are denied the chance to run for one reason or another. One article claims that vote share has no impact on the positions gained by elected officials, which does suggest that it is largely a rubber-stamping exercise; recall that the ANPP only meets for a few days every year, with day-to-day legislating being handled by the Council of State, and that Mariela Castro is seemingly the only person to have ever voted against a piece of legislation.

I’ve heard it argued that this all merely represents the formal codification of an often-unspoken reality within liberal democratic systems; that is, whilst we may have a proliferation of parties, they ultimately all represent the interests of the wealthy and the neoliberal world order.⁷¹ And certainly, we’ve seen in both the UK and US in recent years that when a socialist (even a moderate one) does try to run for high office, the powers-that-be are merciless in their fearmongering and character assassination. However, whilst the UK’s billionaire press did lose their collective goddamn minds over Corbyn, there was no risk of him being jailed for opposing the dominant ideology and no attempts to drive his car (or, I supposed, Chairman Mao-style bicycle) off the road. Similarly, there is no suggestion that the vote counts of the 2017 and 2019 general elections were illegitimate, meaning that even if the media coverage will have given many a distorted view, Corbynism failed to win over a sufficient number of voters for other reasons besides this (in the latter case, I imagine mostly Brexit). All this is to say that, whilst the deck is most certainly stacked within our own system, this just does not compare to Cuba where the deck is a load of copies of the same card and you risk jail for proposing a game of anything other than 52-Card Pickup.

So, Cubans’ only means of expressing dissent through their electoral system is through abstention, and the two possible forms of this seem to be massively on the rise: turnout in elections that took place shortly before we arrived was only 75%, down from a normal baseline of near 100% for the duration of Fidel’s reign; and the number of people voting selectively from the list of candidates provided has doubled from ~5–9% under Fidel to ~20%. I think the contrast in turnout between the 2019 constitutional referendum (~90%) and the 2023 parliamentary (~75%) and 2022 municipal (~69%) elections may be illustrative of this dissent;⁷² it would make sense that the former was viewed as a way to effect actual change, though within limitations, whilst the others are not (although the low municipal turnout would run counter my theory that there is at least low-level democratic engagement in Cuba). This is also why Torres Corona’s point about the relatively small scale of the July 11 protests is disingenuous; that they happened at all is remarkable (and, whilst I was in Havana following the Brigade, there was another protest in Guantánamo Province that led to the Internet being shut down for 24 hours).

The Cuban state’s (or, more accurately, every state’s) go-to response to accusations of repression is to point at external and internal threats, but what struck me was that no real attempt was made to outright deny that the repression existed throughout the trip; it was just ignored, not mentioned. Sometimes, it was indirectly implied to be necessary to defend the Revolution, and I am somewhat sympathetic to this argument: the Cuban Revolution (and the Party that considers itself its steward) has been facing an existential threat from the most powerful empire humanity has ever seen for sixty years. We’re not just talking times of war here, we’re talking times of absolutely cartoonish villainy: take, for example, Operation Peter Pan, where the CIA and the Catholic Church conspired to spread fear amongst Cuban parents that the government were about to nationalise their children. They then facilitated the exodus of over 14,000 unaccompanied minors (some as young as 6), many of whom suffered abuse and neglect in their new homes and perhaps as many as 10% of whom were never reunited with their parents. There have, historically, been no depths to which the US is unwilling to sink against Cuba, and in that light it makes a lot more sense why the government wants to keep a tight grip on the information reaching its citizens (amongst other, more normal state reasons like suppressing criticism and maintaining control).

Also, in the face of such pressures, it is unlikely that the UK or US would brook much criticism: this is not speculation, we have the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 from the First World War, the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939 from the Second and the Terrorism Act 2006 and the USA PATRIOT Act from the War on Terror, along with pandemic restrictions on speech, assembly, etc. When faced with a threat, be it military, economic, disease or otherwise, the state will encroach on people’s rights to guarantee its own security.

The other reason I am somewhat sympathetic to the Cuban government argument is that the UDHR lists 30 rights, of which the rights to freedom of expression (art.  19) and peaceful assembly (art.  20) are only two: where these are fairly well-established in the UK and US (current Tory/Republican attempts to restrict them notwithstanding), we’re backtracking on guaranteeing others such as the right to asylum (art.  14). Some are potentially better achieved through alternate systems (e.g., the right to democracy [art.  21], which sounds like it could well be better served by the more participatory Cuban system that we have been shown than our own system of five-yearly elections of careerist PPE graduates and atrocious wankers) and on some, the Cubans are leaps and bounds ahead of us (e.g., the right to education [art.  26], taking into account their far more limited resources).

But there is certainly a viciousness to a lot of their rhetoric around dissidents,⁷³ as well as all of the well-document allegations of physical brutality and persistent harassment. Even beyond Díaz-Canel calling for people to fight the July 11 protests in the street, the constant talk about shadowy counter-revolutionaries who are all US-funded foreign agents really starts to wear. For one, it often makes very little sense: nobody starves themselves to death for a pay cheque from Uncle Sam. For two, it can serve to confuse cause and effect: yes, the US probably does recruit and train individuals for the purpose of destabilising the Cuban government, but likely far more common is that they find people who have organically decided they are against the system they live in for whatever reason, and support them because their interests are aligned. That doesn’t make those people paid shills, and it doesn’t inherently make their complaints illegitimate; the Cuban government’s repression may well put them in a position where they have no means to make a living beyond what the US offers them. It’s telling that so many of the new generation of dissidents, like Yoani Sánchez, are young; they weren’t there for the triumph of the Revolution or the almost apocalyptic ideological struggle of the Cold War, they just know the Cuba of today that they have been born into and think it could be improved in ways the current system does not allow.

To quote Amartya Sen, democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes.. Despite the risks, Cubans (and especially young Cubans) are increasingly speaking out. Those that do not speak out publicly are clearly making their dissatisfaction known through the limited electoral means available to them, as I’ve said. Given the inherent ambiguity of abstention figures and the like it’s hard to tell exactly what message they’re trying to send; are they annoyed with the PCC and its authoritarianism, or with the entire socialist project? So whilst I do think there is some form of genuine participative democracy happening in Cuba, at least at the lower levels, it is highly constrained and has little to no sway in the upper echelons of government. I do understand that there are practical reasons for this—Bolender writes in Voices from the Other Side that the Cuban side has determined unity to be a crucial weapon in combating terrorism, subsequently developing a low tolerance for anything that is seen to be jeopardizing strength of patria, and the paranoia of the PCC is certainly not without cause—but if they really believed their own rhetoric about the people standing behind them (the Party) through thick and thin, they would have nothing to fear from giving the people a means to contradict them, and to be clear on exactly why they were doing so. Or perhaps the voters would give the Party its first unquestionable mandate to continue on.

A Blockade for All Occasions ¶

One thing that kept coming up, in every single talk we heard or visit we made, was the blockade. Now, obviously, the blockade is hugely damaging. It is estimated to have cost the Cuban economy over $1tn over half a century.⁷⁴ It has certainly killed people. In the grand scheme of US crimes against humanity it is amongst the longest-running, least-successful and perhaps most pointlessly cruel. It clearly hasn’t worked and there is no reason to expect that the sixty-second year of the blockade is the one that’ll finally clinch it.

Of course, opposing the blockade was one of the key purposes of the Brigade, so it is unsurprising that it kept coming up, but it really did get blamed for everything. For example, whilst writing this piece an article came out in the Cuban state press claiming that the blockade was responsible for hindering 13,000 cataract surgeries; however, at no point does it explain how the blockade is responsible, just that they have that many people on their waiting list. It doesn’t even say whether those surgeries are actually held up, or if that’s an unusually high number to have on their waiting list.⁷⁵

But, and there is a but, shortages and privation were not unknown to every other Marxist–Leninist country in history, even without a blockade. My parents spent time in Czechoslovakia in 1990 and described the empty store shelves to me. The Soviet Union was repeatedly wracked by famines of its own making, as is North Korea today. Centrally planned economies centrally suck for a whole slew of reasons that have been debated over at great length, and I don’t even think reasonable communists and I disagree totally on this; consider their recent opening of a partial private economy, and Toledo Santander’s comment about recognising the market, but not letting it run loose. Market forces are a tool like any other, powerful if utilised correctly and dangerous if misapplied or fetishised.⁷⁶

So would Cuba still be facing the economic struggles it is facing today, absent the blockade? Is it facing the same problems that previous planned economies have done, albeit exacerbated by the blockade, or has its distinct form of socialism solved all of those and all that remains is the blockade? If anyone could do it, my money would be on the Cubans, but it is impossible, under the current circumstances, to separate the signal from the noise; the only way to find out is to change the experimental conditions, and see what happens to a post-blockade Cuba. That, pragmatically, is reason enough to oppose the blockade: either Cuba can then flourish to the extent they claim they could, or the government loses its biggest excuse for its failures and finds itself out on its arse before long. Either outcome would be fine.

Wheat from Chaff ¶

Talk to any pro-Cuba activist, and you will invariably hear several stats: the six-month literacy campaign in the ’60s practically eradicated illiteracy in the country; Cuba spends over twice the proportion of its GDP on education as the UK and US (the second-highest rate in the world, after the Marshall Islands); and Cuba has amongst the highest life expectancy and lowest infant mortality rates in the world. These are all true, and represent incredible achievements for the Cuban project, but to ascribe them specifically to the Marxist–Leninist aspect of the Cuban project seems to me to be misleading.

For example, India had a literacy rate of around a third of Cuba’s lower, rural rate in 1960 (~20% to Cuba’s ~60%; the Cuban city rate was ~89%), and whilst the rate certainly hasn’t improved anywhere near as quickly (now sitting at ~70%, 60 years later), that improvement represents almost 900m newly-literate Indians—90 entire Cubas worth of people, or an average of 7,500,000 every six months—and India did it without Marxism–Leninism or even a commitment to communism (though they did have a partially-planned economy from until 1991). Similarly, if you add India to that graph of infant mortality, the range of the y-axis quadruples just to fit the Indian rate in 1960, and whilst today it is still several times the rates of Cuba, the US and the UK, the reduction is just phenomenal. Infant mortality worldwide has more than halved since 1960. And on education spend as a share of GDP, Cuba is an outlier even amongst other Marxist–Leninist countries: Vietnam is #91, China is #110 and Laos #154. Meanwhile, the Scandinavian social democracies—Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland—are all in the top 20.

I’m not here to try and Hans Rosling all of the magic out of the Cuban political project; many of its achievements are genuinely incredible, especially given its limited resource and the continual spectre of the blockade, and Rosling’s use of those similar figures to defend the current world order are similarly vulnerable to criticism. But they do show that Marxism–Leninism alone is neither necessary nor sufficient for the achievements that have been made. Many of the examples I cited above show that the gains of the Cuban Revolution come within the context of worldwide improvements, or of similar advances made in countries that have adopted very different economic systems. To quote someone I met in Mexico, it shows that maybe ideology isn’t the whole story; things like penicillin are good, and things like hand washing are also good. But, in the light of my previous conclusions about democracy in Cuba, examples like the education spending⁷⁷ show that the very just priorities of the Cuban project are not necessarily dependent on its current Marxist–Leninist ideology, just as the Revolution itself wasn’t. Cubans claimed back their nation and their right to self-determination, and there is no reason to assume that if the Cubans were to implement a pluralistic democracy they would choose to give up their social services or strong sense of community:⁷⁸

For many Cubans, though, decades of ideology can now be boiled down to two services: free health care and a strong public education system. In conversations in Matanzas Province and Havana, these two services were often cited as the priorities they would never give up. An injection of capitalism, American culture and more inequity among social classes seemed to be of less concern than protecting these pillars of the socialized state.

Obviously, this would require some smart structural work⁷⁹ to ensure that an ideologically-redirected Cuba would not be torn apart by foreign capital as was the former Soviet Union.⁸⁰ We in Britain had a health service, if we could keep it, and we proved that we could not; the loss of the Cuban health service would be a loss not just for Cuba, but for the world, and should absolutely be avoided. But as much as the PCC tries to conflate itself with the Revolution, and itself with the people of Cuba, the Revolution succeeded independent of it and the Cuban political project would be more than able to continue independent of it again, as would the people of Cuba, should they choose to do so. And the pragmatist in me wonders if reforming from a post-Cold War Marxist–Leninist holdout into a highly protectionist democratic socialist state, with the same peace- and justice-focussed foreign policy (along with their distant neighbour Costa Rica), would serve the cause of removing the core justification for the blockade (though I am not so naïve as to think it would disappear overnight), allowing the project the breathing room it has long deserved, without betraying its principles; such a Cuba could well prove to be about as benevolent a state as is possible.⁸¹

As Castro himself said, upon arriving in Havana after the overthrow of the dictator:

The Revolution is still being led by an army in battle order. Who, now and in the future, may be the enemies of the Revolution? Who, standing before this victorious people, could be the future enemies of the Revolution? The worst enemies which the Cuban Revolution could face in the future are us, the revolutionaries.

This is what I always told the rebel fighters: when we no longer have the enemy before us, when the war is over, we ourselves are potentially the only enemies of the Revolution…

I say and I swear before my compatriots that if any of my comrades, or our movement, or I myself, prove to be the slightest obstacle to the nation’s peace, from this very moment the people may do with all of us what they will, and tell us what we must do.

The Marxist–Leninist ideology and its attendant authoritarianism appear to now be an obstacle to the nation’s peace, whilst also not being a vital necessity for any of the achievements that people laud Cuba for. The Marxist–Leninist experiment has been run many times over the past century, and it has always failed; the state does not wither away, it just ossifies and grows at the expense of the people until it either finds a relatively stable equilibrium or overextends and brings the whole project down with it. Marxism–Leninism clearly does not lead to a communist society, that much is clear. A Cuba that was willing to abandon that project, whilst remaining socialist, would have a world to win.

What is to be Done? ¶

The challenge represented by ending the blockage is huge. There is no point in appealing to any sense of morality or justice amongst the squalid ghouls that populate the US foreign policy apparatus; these are the same creatures who will hear that their sanctions are killing half a million children and glibly declare that they think it’s worth it. Cynically, trying to mobilise popular opposition against the blockade within the US is a long shot, as the wishes of the American people have very little sway over the direction of the federal government, particularly (in this case) whilst the Miami exiles remain such a potent voting bloc (though to try is still better than to not). And, most relevantly for our delegation (and all but one of the delegations that made up the Brigade), we don’t even live in the US.

The one unilateral option open to the Cuban government is what I have just discussed,⁸² but for us, there is only person-to-person solidarity. We (and the Brigade as a whole) demonstrated this in abundance, bringing suitcases full of medical and educational supplies with us which were then distributed during our visits. Not only that, but by visiting the country at all (which, for the Yanks, meant being harassed by border thugs upon their return home)⁸³ we brought much-needed foreign currency in with us and can take stories out with us; per one of the few practical suggestions in the conference workshop, we can tell others to visit, too, and do likewise. We can educate ourselves about the Cuban Revolution and the remarkable successes that their political project has achieved since; we can be forthright, though fair, in pointing out its problems, and choose to provide critical friendship over meaningless flattery, which would do more harm in the long run. We must be windows to within and advocates from without, but never propagandists, who invariably undermine their own credibility and soon become useless.

So, in (finally) closing, I say:

• ¡abajo el bloqueo!, without equivocation;
• solidarity with the Cuban people, as to all peoples, and their right to determine their own fate without the US or the PCC interfering; and, of course,
• ¡viva la Decimosexta Brigada!

We Nicaraguans have many dictators. Then we kill them.

My lengthy excursion across Panama now over, it was time to head all the way back across the Central American isthmus and beyond. I was expected in Nicaragua in about a couple week’s time, and after deciding against a ludicrously overpriced flight to Managua (~£500 for a 1hr30 flight) I was instead going to savour the journey towards the spiciest country I’ve been to yet.

Costa Rica ¶

Indiana Ben and the Kingdom of the Crystal Dipshits ¶

24 straight hours of bussing after leaving Puerto Lara, and I was finally at the famous Puerto Viejo (de Talamanca), just across the Costa Rica–Panama border on the Caribbean coast. Puerto Viejo itself is a major backpacker/party/surf town and I’d met many people heading to or coming from it throughout this trip, so I figured I’d check it out and then I could at least say I’d seen more of Costa Rica than just the Osa peninsula. As one might expect from a Caribbean beach town in the middle of a tropical paradise, the beaches were lovely and I rented a bike along with another guy from my hostel (another German, of course) and went on a nice cycle ride along the coast towards Manzanillo (though the nature reserve was a disappointment).

Despite the luscious scenery, I kind of hated Puerto Viejo. It’s the first place I’ve been to during this trip that really felt like there was no real town underneath the shell of the tourist town—I imagine everyone who works there commutes in from distant elsewheres. Worse than that was the precise flavour of tourists that seemed drawn to the place, a cohort I shall unaffectionately call the ‘crystal dipshits’: think harem pants; twirling poi; sensitive young men playing guitars on the grass with their shirts off; more than happy to tell you the latest woo they’ve adopted from some ancient vaguely Asian custom; and quick to rail against non-specific toxins in coffee or soda whilst doing lines of cocaine or taking ‘shrooms all day. Also, as an added twist, now they’re all also anti-vax and just as eager to tell you about that, including my personal favourites: a UK couple who got refused entry to Nicaragua at the border when they were unable to present their vaccination cards or a recent negative test result, in what I can only describe as a monumentally negligent approach to looking up entry requirements before setting off.

Photo by the author

Truly, I have never seen more white people with dreadlocks, and the first hostel I stayed at—Rockin’ Js—had an aesthetic I could best describe as refugee camp-chic, with a two-storey building and rows upon rows of tents (charged at a rate of $10 per person per night, the same price as the air-conditioned dorm room that I inexplicably had entirely to myself). After this first night I switched to Backpackers Puerto Viejo, a much more pleasant little hostel comprising two dorms joined via the kitchen (which was also the building entrance); few other hostels I have stayed in are so perfectly-architected to promote sociality, with everyone inevitably running into each other and hanging out in the central kitchen area, just like university halls. I met several cool people there, including a Quebecoise called Orlean who was heading to Nicaragua to work in a hostel; I noted the location and said I might see her again there.

After a week, I was fed up with the artificiality of the town and the inflated prices of everything, so I took a 5-hour bus up north to San José (standing room only). There I stayed in a slightly more intersting area than I when I had first arrived, in the much nicer In the Wind Hostel, and made a couple pals. One was just coming from Nicaragua and so I asked her about my current plan, which involved crossing at the far less-trafficked of the two official border crossing points (Las Tablillas or San Pancho, depending on which side of the border you’re on) and making my way gradually north towards León through the Rio San Juan region east of Lake Managua, rather than the traditional tourist route on the Pacific side. She told me that she didn’t think it would be doable, that there was nothing there and that I’d struggle to travel on public transport.

I ignored everything that she said.

Nicaragua ¶

The Accidental Immigrant ¶

It was finally time for me to head to Nicaragua, on another 5-hour-long standing-room-only bus to Las Tablillas. The bus stopped just short of the Rio San Juan, the river that delineates much of the Costa Rica–Nicaragua border, and I saw a couple of roadblocks on the bridge; not impassable for a pedestrian, but enough to make me think perhaps that wasn’t the way to go. I saw that everybody who had been on the bust with me turned to the left, past a Costa Rican Red Cross tent, and started heading down a dirt track; this must be some sort of temporary diversion, I thought, and set off along with them.

We walked and walked and walked, which seemed a bit excessive. After a kilometer or two of walking along the border wall, we crossed through a gap in it and doubled back on ourselves. This was a bit of a red flag, and when we had to make an unassisted river crossing (me holding onto branches to keep from falling in with all of my backpacks) I really started to have my doubts about the route I’d chosen:

Photo by the author

When we finally arrived at the Nicaraguan side of the border crossing, I saw a couple of immigration guys leaning against their vehicle impassively watching as the group walked past, and then turned left and headed straight into Nicaragua. I went up to them and asked where I was supposed to get my Costa Rican exit stamp, and after much bemusement they pointed back across the bridge… to Costa Rica.

It turns out I’d accidentally managed to follow a big group of Venzuelans sneaking into the country (although given that the authorities were sat there watching it, sneaking feels like the wrong word). Regardless, the clearly-amused immigration girl was surprisingly friendly, given where I was and how many men with guns were walking around, and she thankfully sent my dopey ass back across the border the direct way. The Costa Rican guards asked me if I was coming from Nicaragua to Costa Rica, and I tried to explain in Spanish that, physically, yes I was, but legally, I had never left. They were confused, but seemed to get bored with me pretty quickly and shooed me further on.

Eventually I had all of my paperwork in order and crossed back again, over the bridge this time.

Heading Downriver ¶

My next stop was San Carlos, in the south-eastern corner of the enormous Lake Nicaragua. The town is gorgeous, with steep elevation changes between streets and a destinctive style of brightly-painted buildings. The chaos of the bus terminal—thronged with passengers, luggage assistants, people selling anything and everything and the semi-official money-changing coyotes plying their trade in their distinctive tan utility vests—was a fine introduction to the intensity of Nicaragua.

The next day, I took a two-hour boat ride downriver to the small, car-free town of El Castillo, so named for the old Spanish fort atop its central hill, and fell in love with the place immediately. I had read a blog post that recommended a tour guide called Juan Ardilla and sought him out, but he didn’t have any solo tour options available; he introduced me to another solo traveller (a German) who had arrived the same day, and by the evening we’d arranged an all-day tour for us and a handful of people we’d both met in our respective hostels through Basiliscus Tours. In the meantime, I revelled in the price difference between Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Photo by the author

We set off the next day on kayaks, exploring the tributaries of the Río San Juan for most of the morning. I shared mine with the German and an Austrian–French couple, one of whom was certainly out of his depth as the captain and kept crashing us into the bank, through tree branches or beaching us on submerged logs. He also drank almost an entire bottle of rum throughout the course of the day, which may have been part of the problem, but at least he was happy to share it with his crewmates.

We disembarked, checked in with a couple of soldiers (who seem to have the most boring job in the world) and went on a hike through the Refugio Bartola. Our guide was excellent, explaining the traditional uses of various plants, pointing out tiny poison dart frogs and telling us which plants to eat without dying. When we got back to town we all went our separate ways (it was only me and a French girl called Alice in our hostel, the others were all elsewhere). We all got back together that afternoon for dinner and drinks, which ended on a bit of a bum note when the incredibly drunk Austrian guy got feisty and started going on and on about killing Austrian politicians (first to a random German girl from another group that was in the restaurant, and then to us when they unsurprisingly decided to leave); I was in no mood for this kind of edgy LARPing and told him to pack it in.

Photo by the author

I was so enamoured with the town that I extended my stay several times. Alice and I explored the town, checking out the COODEPROSA chocolate co-operative on the outskirts where I had my first taste of the stuff in many months and sampling the fresh fruit juices at Border’s Coffee. I developed a brief infatuation with the This American Life radio show, and figured out how to connect my OSMAnd mapping app. with my OpenStreetMap account so that I could update the data for the town, as most of the restaurants were currently showing as being in the middle of the river:

Screenshot by the author

Somehow a horse tour that Alice had tried to arrange morphed into her helping a farmer take his produce to another nearby town, and we joined back up with others from the tour for a couple meals and a night-time boat tour. My final day there I spent wandering into every school I could find to ask if they needed English and/or IT teachers, with the intention of spending a lot more time here after returning from Cuba. I gave my number to a bunch of people, but except for one school administrator who sent me a single hola a month later and then didn’t reply to my follow-up question I have had no success thusfar and I no longer have the time to spare on this trip; however, at least I have one contact now, and I’m definitely expecting to come back here someday (not least when I’m ready to retire).

Today is Gonna be a Volcano Day ¶

Photo by the author

Alas, my time in El Castillo had to come to an end. Alice and I made our way back to San Carlos, watched the sun set behind the volcanos of Ometepe island and drank by the shore of Lake Nicaragua as we waited for our overnight chicken bus. This turned out to be a pretty bad idea, as chicken buses are not known to be particular conducive to sleep; after five hours on an uncushioned school bus chair my arse was as numb as it’s ever been. We arrived into Managua around 4am and said our goodbyes, and after a couple hours of waiting the first colectivo to León arrived; a minibus with no luggage rack, and after a couple that were too full I eventually managed to squeeze myself and all of my luggage into a seat.

Finally, after a largely sleepless night I arrived at 7am. I was there to volunteer with Volcano Day as a tour guide, and when I arrived they immediately asked if I wanted to go our on a tour that day; I said I’d think about it, and then fell asleep whilst unpacking my stuff and missed the group’s departure. That proved to be lucky, though, because it meant that I got to go volcano boarding in the afternoon instead:

Hanna

Whilst the company offered many tours, the most commonly-booked were the volcano boarding on Cerro Negro (the second-biggest source of tourist income in Nicaragua, so I’m told) and various hikes on El Hoyo and Telica ranging from sunrise and sunset trips to overnight camping expeditions. I got bored of the volcano boarding pretty quickly (and fed up with the expectation of pouring rum and cokes in the back of an old army truck as it bounced around the moonscape surrounding the volcano), but luckily I seemed to get pigeonholed as a camper/hiker pretty early on and didn’t get many boarding shifts after the first week.

Telica crater was always impressive and the sunrise views were incredible; Telica sunrise shifts were perhaps the best available, as a 4am start would get you back by 9am and done for the rest of day, so it was effectively like getting an extra day off. El Hoyo was a more demanding hike, but the views from the campsite were absolutely astonishing; the walk down to Lake Asososca was incredibly tedious, but definitely paid off when arriving at the destination. Unexpectedly, I ran into Orlean again on a volcano boarding tour, as she’d decided to come check it out before heading to her hostel. I again said I might see her there, but later decided I would probably just stay working with Volcano Day until my flight to Cuba.

During this time, I also deepend my antipathy towards reggaeton (although I do still think that Gasolina slaps). From the buses of Panama to the volcanos of Nicaragua, this omnipresent, hyperactive noise-masqeurading-as-music had been dogging me for several months. The final straw came on the Las Peñitas party bus, were nobody else volunteered to connect to the speaker and so I did. After a couple tracks of blessed relief (a mix of Black Box and Swedish House Mafia, I believe), someone asked me if I had any reggaeton, as though I would have sullied my phone’s storage with such frivolities.

Labour Organising with Volunteer Labour ¶

As a seasoned voluntourist by now, not to mention an inveterate rabble-rouser, I also did my bit to remind the others of their reponsibilities (or lack thereof) as volunteers, seeing as how we were all making the owners far more money than they were spending on our twice-daily rice and beans and poorly-maintained accommodation.

For example, the deal we’d all made was 6 days on and 1 day off each week.¹ As my first week drew to a close, I told people it was my day off the following day, though the schedule hadn’t yet come out. They all came out with stories about how it’d never happen like that and how they worked 12 days before getting their first day off, etc.; lo and behold, when the schedule came out, I had been put down for a tour and the others all chuckled at my hubris. Then I called over the girl who wrote the schedule, told her she’d made a mistake and that tomorrow was my day off, and promptly found myself removed from the shift.

Where the others took their shafting as some sort of rite of passage, I just took it as them being crap at enforcing boundaries. I also think there’s a moral case to be made for working-to-rule as a volunteer (and even, potentially, being a little flakey and unreliable) so as to counteract the natural incentive for an employer to rely on enthusiastic free labour rather than employing locals.²

Photo by the author

It’s ambiguous whether the day off palaver was a conscious attempt to screw over volunteers or simply the result of crap organisation (i.e., I don’t think they were tracking people’s days off, and just expected people to raise the issue themselves), but it would happen pretty regularly. Also, we wouldn’t get the schedule for the following day until around 20:30 the night before, which meant it was basically impossible to make any plans, and if you were unlucky with one of the 2am starts it would mean only getting ~5 hours of sleep (and that’s only if you went straight to bed when the rota came out). There was some other schedule-based tomfoolery as well, such as one guy who returned from an overnight tour to find that he was supposed to turn around and go back out later that day, and one girl who got sent on a sunset tour with 45 minutes notice on the same day as a leaving dinner put on, in part, for her, which then had to be delayed until she got back.

Whilst I was initially wary of the company being an exploitative expat-run business (e.g., I had never been near a volcano before, so why was I being entrusted to lead tours on them?), I was glad to see that it (unlike the rival company across the road) was local-owned and that most of the Nica staff seemed to enjoy their work, although there was definitely some sketchiness with how the drivers were treated and some of the younger Nicas there were effectively on unpaid internships. I could also see our unique value as English-speaking volunteers pretty quickly, as most of the clients spoke English³ and most of the Nicas did not, or not well enough, or they were too shy to try to. They knew the routes inside and out though, so we would usually end up as translators and general morale-boosters (and/or bartenders), as well as giving the Nicas a chance to practice their English both on- and off-shift. Plus, at least two of the three bosses were pretty chill, and we could generally slip in as many beer orders with returning tour groups as we wanted.

Photo by the author

But it wasn’t all good. On one Telica tour we left some food out on the campsite table overnight, but unbeknownst to us (or at least me) there were wild horses roaming the area who made short work of our breakfast supplies and made a terrible mess. When we got back, the boss tried to make the Nica I had been with pay for breakfasts in the restaurant we operated out of for all of the clients; this despite the fact that the guy was one of the unpaid interns, and that the boss had just made several hundreds of dollars from the tour. Luckily, one of other owners intervened and my guy got off with a slap on the wrist and a funny story.

The moral of the story is that looking for expat–local exploitation was always going to be too limited a scope; whilst it is a decent heuristic for avoiding contributing to another problem (i.e., paying money that will be immediataely siphoned out of the country to help pay for some Yank’s second home), it’s naive to think that locally-owned business are immune to exploitation. The interests of bosses and workers, whatever their respective nationalities or other superficial similarities, are always at odds and a cool boss is, at the end of the day, still a boss.

Join a co-op.

Semana Santa ¶

Also unbeknownst to me was that my time at Volcano Day overlapped with Semana Santa, or the Holy Week before Easter, which it turns out is a very big deal indeed in Latin America. For a full week we were fully booked every day, sometimes with multiple groups going on the same tours. Hondurans, El Salvadorans, Costa Ricans and more made their ways to León to hike, board and party. The larger Spanish-speaking groups would generally go with Nica guides on their own, but I had a few join on to tours I was leading, and all I can say is that Latinos are definitely not a naturally athletic people (with the prominent exception of one Costa Rican family, where the parents were both crossfit enthusiasts and where the father ended up carrying two backpacks for the two-day trip after the youngest daughter threw a dramatic wobbly about 5 minutes in).

On Easter itself, all those of us who had the afternoon off took a ride the district of Sutiaba to check out their famous passion carpets. Unfortunately, the Church is currently in a fight with the Ortega government and, as a result, the traditional procession of walking through them was cancelled this year; instead, people just dashed them apart themselves.

I Can’t Work in These Conditions ¶

In the end, I spent three weeks working with Volcano Day. It was a bit of a mixed bag: I loved the core activity of hiking and camping (obviously), and I never really had a bad client (though I did have some slow ones, plus one dad-and-lad who had a very odd dynamic, with the kid refusing to join him any photos and constantly complaining about others being NPCs like the weird alt-right kid from Knives Out). But the lack of organisation really started to grate. For example, kit prep was always a nightmare as the number of clients continually changed, and on one overnight trip we arrived at the campsite to discover that in the chaos the kit that had been grabbed was missing tent pegs and a tent; me and the other guide bivouacked in just our sleeping bags that night

The state of the volunteer accommodation was also pretty ropey, with trash everywhere and always a huge pile of unwashed dishes beside the sink:

Photo by the author

We had breakfast and lunch provided each day, but not dinner, but we also had nowhere to store food and were discouraged from using the kitchen (due, not unreasonably, to the women who cooked our meals not wanting to find it left messy). The end result was that we basically had to eat out every night; there was cheap food around, and healthy food, but rarely dfid the twain meet. However, perhaps the biggest killer for me was the inability to plan anything in advance due to how last-minute we would receive our tour allocations. All the late nights and surprise early starts were also a potent recipe for sleep deprivation, on top of the physically demanding nature of the work, and a set of weakened immune systems paired with the unhygeinic living conditions left everybody subject to a continually circulating set of bugs and colds.

Most of my spare time was spent either in ViaVia, the restaurant out of which Volcano Day operated, or by the beach at Las Peñitas. Both tended to involve drinking. We volunteers went up as a group one evening to watch the sunset from the roof of the Cathedral, and had a couple very wholesome family meals. The city itself was markedly more pleasant than all of the Central American cities I had been to by this point, with its charming colonial architecture and small size.⁴ Also, whilst our accommodation may have been pretty grim, there were loads of kittens in it:

Nicaragua, According to the Nicaraguans ¶

Before arriving in Nicaragua, I had some prior familiarity with its history: the Somoza dictatorship; the Sandinista revolution; and the civil war against the US-backed Contras.⁵ Of the period since the ’80s, though, I knew markedly less, beyond a handful of articles about press crackdowns in Index on Censorship. However, I had watched the documentary ¡Las Sandinistas! with a group of friends and already had some inkling of the rocks upon which the Nicaraguan Revolution had run aground, as the women who were essential to the success of the Revolution⁶ found themselves sidelined by their macho comrades and the addressing of their concerns was put indefinitely on hold. I was going into it with an open mind, then, but primed to be critical (as always).

All of the long drives and remote camping trips provided a fantastic opportunity to talk to the Nicas away from the threat of surveillance within the city (where they were noticably more reticent), and whilst many were critical of the FSLN it’s worth noting that this was not monolithic, even amongst the young Nicas, with one of them (whose middle name, I think it’s relevant to point out, was Stalin) praising the government for making Nicaragua far safer than its neigbours, and free of the issues of gang violence that have so plagued them. Another pointed out el Fortín de Acosasco as we drove past it, telling us of the torture and forced disappearances that took place there under the Somoza regime (including some of his own family members, the whereabouts of whose remains has never been determined; he spoke of bodies disposed in some of Nicaragua’s many volcanoes, though I’ve not been able to corroborate that). There were a lot of faded posters along the highways in support of Ortega, and we drove under a bridge almost every day on which someone had painted the words Daniel 2011.

However, another expressed his fear that Nicaragua would be the next Cuba (a particularly interesting comment given that Cuba was to be my next destination), and another concurred, saying that the only difference at the moment was the lack of a centrally-planned economy. And even the guy who pointed out el Fortín complained about the rampant corruption in current-day Nicaragua, particularly of the Transit Police who he said act like a gang, shaking down drivers by issuing spurious fines. I asked him what happens socially when someone decide to join the police if they’re so detested; he said everyone stops talking to them.

On my final weekend in León I finally got around to taking the free walking tour that I’d be putting off since I’d arrived. It was fantastic, and the guide was surprisingly candid about the current state of affairs Nicaragua; at one point I asked him if he worried about getting in trouble and he just said it hadn’t happened yet, and that he knew how to tailor the speech when there were Nicas in the audience. He highlighted a lot of interesting facts about Nicaragua, three key figures I remember being that around 77% of the working population are in informal employment, some 90% live along the Pacific coast and in the interior highlands and 30% live below the poverty line; the one that really surprised me was that the average age is just 25. He also spoke rapturously about the presidency of Violeta Chamorro—who he called the lady of peace—and recounted bitterly Ortega’s manouevering to victory in the 2006 elections against a divided opposition and with only 38% of the vote,⁷ in one of the last elections generally recognised as having been conducted freely and fairly.

Photo by the author

He showed us buildings that still bore bullet holes from the 2018 protests across the road from the city’s hospital, where he told us about the free (but chronically underresourced) healthcare system;⁸ compared to the shiny private hostel around the corner from our place, the state-run one truly looked dilapidated, and our guide told us that hospital-acquired infections were commonplace (though I haven’t found any source to back that up). And, in fairness, he did also say that there was a new hospital currently under construction on the outskirts of the city. Nicaragua, he also pointed out, is a terrible country in which to be a woman; despite initially progressive measures in healthcare and reproductive autonomy following the Revolution, Ortega’s turn to the right and alliance with the Catholic Church upon his return to power has seen the banning of abortions in all circumstances and many restrictions on access to contraception, along with the shuttering of vital women’s services and upticks in rates of domestic violence, sexual assault and femicide (because no duh).

One thing I hadn’t noticed until our guide pointed it out was the complete lack of newspapers in the many roadside stalls and corner shops; the last independent newspaper in Nicaragua had ended its print edition in 2021 in the face of government repression, including a blockade on ink and paper coming into the country. Our guide also took us to the university and explained that higher education is free to Nicaraguans, but that a Bachelor’s takes around 5 years and is only available to those with the means to live in the cities throughout that time; also, depending on the subject, the pro-government propaganda in the teaching materials can be more or less overbearing, though I don’t see how this could affect degrees like computer science or medicine overly much (#STEMmasterrace).

He also highlighted the underdevelopment of the interior and Caribbean coast of the country, which he felt to be intentional; with fewer eyes in those parts of the country, the Ortega government was free to plunder their natural resources in combination with foreign businesses, which echoed the explanation given to us by our guide in El Castillo when we asked why the military were restricting entrance into the Indio Maíz Reserve. Daniel Ortega’s personal net worth is apparently estimated to be around $50m, though these figures are worth taking with a pinch of salt; however, our tour guide did say that whilst Nicaragua doesn’t really have a middle class, it does have an aristocracy comprising Ortega, his family and his friends.

Photo by the author

Nicaragua, already the second-poorest country in the Americas after Haiti, has been particularly hard hit by the loss of its tourism industry—the second-biggest in the country—over the years of martial law following the 2018 demonstrations, and then COVID lockdowns immediately afterwards, but the first cruise ship was due to dock some time in August. We all chipped in some money and our guide took us around the local market, sampling various snacks and delicacies that all seemed to be corn-based. At the end, his historical narrative reached the present day and he gave us his unfiltered opinion about the Ortega government. His pride in the country and his frustration with its current political situation was palpable, but he was optimistic: with its young, energetic population, and abundant natural resources, he believed that the moment that the dictator was gone the country would experience a rebirth and rapid development. His excitement was infectious, though the hundreds gunned down between 2018–2020 show that Ortega isn’t going to go quietly.

On my final day in León there was some sort of anniversary and FSLN youth were out on the streets in force holding demonstrations; though curious to talk to some real FSLN superfans, I stayed away; I think the celebrations were related to the 2018 protests and I didn’t fancy having anything to do with that, and I’d heard enough from some of the Nicas about the indiscriminate violence carried out by those same youth during that period to be wary.

Whilst I do still think that the FSLN were undeniably heroic once upon a time,⁹ and some of their achievements like the Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign were and remain hugely impressive, the Ortega rump holding on to power now seems to me to have little to do with them beyond branding.

El Tránsiting ¶

I was about a week away from my scheduled flight to Cuba, which would be departing from San José. I hadn’t really thought about how I planned to get back down there, or exactly when I would tell the bosses that I was off. My vague plan was to go to Ometepe for the better half of a week and tackle the volcanos of Concepción and Maderas, but before I got around to planning anything I ran into a Canado–Croat¹⁰ girl on the walking tour who was headed the same direction as me. After the tour we explored the city, including my first proper pint (ignoring the silly glassware and the ludicrous price) since leaving the UK.

Photo by the author

She was heading to the small fishing village of El Tránsito in the coming days, which just so happened to be the village that Orlean was working in. After a little thought, I decided that there was definitely a compelling argument to spending the intervening week relaxing by the beach rater than going to Ometepe to climb even more volcanoes. I duly informed the bosses that I would be leaving before completing the requested 6 weeks, but it all seemed to be fine. Yuli and I were drinking from midday. Then, at 20:30, I found out I would have to be up at 4am to lead a one-day tour of the usually two-day route up El Hoyo and down to Lake Asososca, solo; I shouldn’t have told the boss that I knew the route when he asked me.

Hanna

The early start not so much, but a good, long final hike the next morning was probably just what my hungover body needed. Once I got back, I planned to go straight to sleep for much of the afternoon but was instead persuaded to join the beach party bus for one last ride. Many beers later, I finally got to sleep around 10pm, as the others got ready to go clubbing.

I’d wiped out the last of my córdobas, so in the morning I headed off to the only cash machine in the entire city that I’d been able to withdraw money from (apparently Mastercard can be temperamental, and both of my banks helpfully replaced my Visa cards without asking shortly before I left the UK after the latter increased their transaction fees). Slightly panicking about how I was going to pay for my journey to El Tránsito, I packed my bags and tried again a few hours later; thankfully, they were working again. I met up with Yuli and we hopped on a chicken bus, then hitched a ride from the highway to the town itself.

A Vacation Within a Vacation ¶

El Tránsito turned out to be a a lovely little fishing village-turned-surf spot. Of course, it has all the same problems that the latter condition brings in terms of profit-siphoning expat-owned businesses, amplified here by the weird fortresslike design of some of these eyesores, but at least that made it easier to identify and avoid them. Another good rule of thumb I found was that anywhere that gave its prices in USD would be about twice the price of anywhere else (if not more: a coffee in a local place would run you 15 córdobas [~15¢] compared to $2 in the fancy, air-conditioned Surf Café). As a seasoned Central American backpacker by this point, I found a few fantastic local eateries—Comedor de Pescadores and El Ancla being the stand-outs—and did my bit to direct others there too, thus eating into the profits of the expat scourge, no matter how minutely.

Photo by the author

Yuli and I stayed at SOLID Surf Camp, which whilst owned by a non-resident expat did seem a little more positive for the community in that it offered volunteering options to guests; the Canado–Croat (a nurse back home) spent one morning going door-to-door providing vaccines and we later both joined an English class for adults to chat with them for a bit. I gave surfing another stab, sharing a day-long board rental with two similarly-amateur Germans, and I popped in to Free Spirit Hostel for a beer pong tournament, much to the surprise of Orlean.

Just as with El Castillo, I continually extended my stay until I had only one day to go until my flight. I set off on the bus at 5am, and 17 hours later I was at Aeropuerto Internacional Juan Santamaría. My flight wasn’t until the next morning, so I tried to sleep, then gave up and watched The Simpsons and the 1964 Soviet propaganda film Soy Cuba, which may well be a new favourite of mine.

I came to Nicaragua excited to see a real revolution first-hand; I left feeling like I had done no such thing. Would I have better luck with my next destination?

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley

I can’t say I’ve spent much of my life thinking about Panama; my knowledge of the place has generally been limited to the Canal, the Panama Papers and the Darién Gap. However, as the best-laid plans of mice and men are wont to do, mine went agley in the best ways possible. As a result, a quick trip across the border for some New Year’s partying became a two-month voyage from one end of the country and back, checking out just about every region of it on the way.

Panama? Completed it mate.

Bocas Nights ¶

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When we last left off, I had just set off from Costa Rica with a couple of Dutch girls in tow and a rough itinerary for making it to our destination in a single day (along with an unused Ticabus ticket to Panama City that would have required me to somehow get to the border for 4am). Our destination was Bocas del Toro, a Caribbean island chain renowned for both its party scene and the natural beauty of its smaller, less developed islands. After spending a wholesome Christmas naked in the jungle hosting film nights and group meals, I wanted to celebrate New Year’s with some debauchery.

At David one of the Dutch girls split off to head elsewhere, whilst Anne and I hopped on a bus (literally, our bags thrown from one bus to the other whilst both were still in motion) heading north, through the scenic Chiriquí mountain range and several indigenous Ngäbe villages, their stilt houses and the women’s traditional dresses instantly serving to differentiate Panama as a very different beast to Costa Rica.

Photo by the author

We arrived in Bocas and split up. Anne was smart enough to book a hostel in Bocas Town itself, whilst I booked one that turned out to be 5 km inland (and got scammed by the taxi there to boot). Not only that, but the hostel—Castillo Inspiración—turned out to be a very odd place indeed; the centerpiece was a castle built out of recycled plastic bottles, seemingly in the middle of a quarry, with our accommodation in a building called the Dungeon beside a pool complete with water slide made out of PVC piping. Not only that, but we got free arrival cocktails at the bar, and more the following day for the owner’s birthday.

We quickly formed a tight group of around 8—a mix of Québécoises, Dutch, American, German and even another Anglo—in no small part down to the shared inconvenience of our location. We also soon found a favourite haunt in town called Coco Fastronomy whose sandwiches (known as bapés) were delicious and whose rear deck views were to die for; at the peak of our addiction, on New Year’s Eve, we spent the entire day there drinking and eating bapés for every meal.

Photo by the author

The neatly-inebriated four of us then realised we had to get back to the castle to pre-drink and get ourselves ready to head back out to a NYE party at Aqua Lounge for which we all had tickets. It was at this point that we realised we were well past the end of the bus service for the day, but luck was on our side: after taking a chance knocking on a darkened bus window, we found a guy who was heading over to the other side of the island to sleep on the beach.¹ He said he could take us so we hopped in and… nothing happened. Slowly, Bocatoreños filled the bus (in varying stages of fiesta) whilst the driver did his grocery shopping and other chores. As we waited, several litres of rum and a stack of plastic cups were produced and shared around. All told, this 5 km ride in the party bus took us a grand total of 2 hours, with us arriving at the castle just in time to change clothes and head straight back out.

Photo by the author

Obviously, by this point, I was about a litre deep and so the remainder of the night is a blur that I largely pieced together from photographic evidence the following day. One thing I definitely do remember, however, was spending midnight leaping into the Caribbean sea fully-clothed and losing $40 that I very optimistically handed to a stranger for safekeeping and never saw again.

New Year’s Day was earmarked for recovering, but at midday the hostel owner and staff (i.e., her brother and nephew) disappeared off to a family get-together and left us the pool, so we did what anybody would do: called our friends from town over and threw a pool party. Then, for reasons I can’t quite recall, I had a third litre-of-rum kind of night on January 2^nd.

At this point the group started to go their separate ways, but after initially trying to rush to catch a bus, the American girl and I realised that rushing was a choice and that we could just stay another night instead. We spent the day recovering from our hangovers with a boat trip to Bastimentos island for snorkelling, before finally departing the following day.

Boquete ¶

Jenneva and I made our way down to Boquete, where we met up again with one of the Québécoise from the castle. For the first couple nights we stayed at Agartha Hostel, which Jen aptly described as having an anti-vax vibe; whilst I don’t know for sure how accurate that specific accusation is, we did run into another guest on the Waterfall Trail who pretty quickly launched into an anti-vax diatribe and there were more than the acceptable number of David Icke books in the hostel bookshelf (the acceptable number being 0).

Photo by the author

We also tackled the El Pianista Trail, whose reputation very much preceded it due to the mysterious deaths of two Dutch hikers in 2016, but which was in fact nothing too intense. It was long though, and we treated ourselves to a night of luxury at Bambuda Castle to recover.

The next night we shifted again to Blasina Beer Hostel, which had an unusual capsule hotel-like design. We also met a Canadian from the Québécoise’s hostel, with whom we ended up going on a last-minute horse-riding trip. The Canadian was a through-and-through horse girl whilst my saddle experience was a couple of polo lessons several years ago, but by the end of the session we were the only two who had managed to get the horses to gallop on command.

Photo by the author

When we got back, most of the others went to bed and I ended up in a bar with the Canadian and the much younger Dutch and Québécoise girls. Where she had been pleasant enough earlier in the day, in the presence of an credulous audience the Canadian started to channel some rather off-putting cokehead energy, regaling us unceasingly with stories about stumbling on drug labs in the Colombian jungle and suchlike that I’m sure are a postcode or two’s distance from anything that has actually happened.

She boasted about all the countries she had ticked off on her mobile app. designed for the purpose, and described her plans to travel to Africa for a year during which she would visit 45 Afrian countries. Some back-of-the-napkin maths suggests an average stay of 5 days in each country, some of which I’m sure take longer than that just to traverse, so I think there must be some sneakiness with tripoints and quadripoints. Regardless, that sounds like an absolutely hellish itinerary.

Alas, whilst our approach of booking the following night’s room the day before had granted us a varied tour of Boquete’s different accommodation options, it fell down when we hit Friday and everything was booked out, both within Boquete and without. Unbenownst to us, we had just hit a bank holiday weekend for Martyr’s Day and the Panamanians were coming out in force. In the end, we found ourselves driven (along with the Québécoise) all the way back down to David.

Stumbling into Santa Catalina ¶

Jen and I parted ways after a couple nights in David, which Wikivoyage describes thusly:

Although David is not particularly interesting, it is a convenient transport hub for destinations in the region

Before long, my plans found themselves scuppered once again. I had intended to head to Playa Venao next to volunteer in a Montessori pre-school, but a week before I was due to arrive they announced they had hired a new staff member and no longer needed me. Adrift, I decided to follow the Québécoise and a French girl we had met on El Pianista to Santa Catalina instead. On the bus ride, I suddenly remembered that I had been messaging a farm near there on Workaway prior to New Year’s and had never followed up with them. I dropped them another message, and by the end of the bus ride I had my next stay lined up.

First, though, I spent a couple nights in the town, during which I took my first surf lesson (and managed to stand up on the board!). When we got back to our hostel, I found I had a message on Workaway addressed hey surfers; I was now part of this elite group, and sent a message back.

Rebecca Olive

On my last day, the three of us rented a couple kayaks and paddled out to a nearby island. Unfortunately, a storm blew in and we had to make a split-second decision on whether to try and race back across the channel before we lost visibility of the other shore or whether to hunker down on the island and wait for it to pass. We ultimately went for racing across which, in retrospect, was probably a bad idea, but in this case luck was on our side and the storm blew back out the other way as we were crossing.

Then it was off to the finca (i.e., smallholding farm), to work for the next several weeks. The property itself was a former cattle farm that had been bought by the owners—a family from South Africa—a few years previously with the intention of allowing the original foliage to regrow in the hopes it would then attract wildlife currently absent from the area and they could rent out cabins to birdwatchers and the like. The progress made up until now was certainly impressive, particularly on the property boundaries when compared to the neighbouring fields:

There were several other Workawayers there: another wildland firefighter, this time from Canada; a Swiss schoolteacher; and a German girl who’d just spent the best part of a year at an animal sanctuary in Costa Rica. During the day we would water trees, whack weeds and whatever else needed doing, and then most afternoons we’d hitch a ride into the town proper to hang out on the beach. We had weekends off, but most of the time I would book myself into a beautiful cliffside hostel—Surfer’s Paradise—and spend the days working on my laptop with an absolutely incredible view.

Photo by the author

As much as I had fun in Santa Catalina, I can’t help but feel that it only has a few more years before it is unrecognisable to me. Whilst Wikivoyage describes the surf breaks as uncrowded, that information is clearly a few years old because when the surf was good there would barely be a clear spot along the whole break. Also, whilst the key surf beach is currently a 30-min walk from the centre of town down a largely featureless road, there are several developments of fancy condos (and a Selina hostel) currently being built along it and a dirt road that bypasses the main town entirely; my prediction is that within a few years, those condos will be completed, the dirt road will be developed into a proper road and the town itself will have the oxygen sucked out of it as tourists take the bypass road to their resorts, find all of their needs met there and no longer need to visit the town itself. But hopefully I’m wrong.

A Disastrous Excursion ¶

Concurrently to working on the farm, I had been in touch with the Workaway person who had messaged me earlier. She was trawling for volunteers to work at a surf camp on the next peninsula over, helping with maintenance and painting tasks. Free daily surf lessons were amongst the perks offered, and I reasoned that it would be a smart move since I could then a) practice surfing intensively to capitalise on my recent lesson and b) keep moving eastward towards my next scheduled Workaway in Darién. I asked why they had contacted me through Workaway but didn’t have a profile, and the girl told me that the owners had previously had an account but didn’t want to pay the membership fee any more; fair enough. I arranged a start date and let the Santa Catalina host know when I would be heading off. The day came, and I set off on a two-day journey to the remote village of Guanico Abajo, where the El Ranchito Surfcamp was located.

Photo by the author

I arrived and was shown to the spartan accommodation, which I was sharing with three Swiss and a German. I had really landed in a cluster of the German Extended Universe, with the other volunteers hailing from Austria, Germany, Switzerland and even Lichtenstein. We chatted, and I learned that the surf lessons took place around 7 am at the beach 5 km away, whilst our shifts started at 7:30; in other words, the free surf lessons existed only in theory. Disappointing, but I would still have a couple days off each week to take advantage of them.

The next morning, I showed up for my shift and was shown what I was to paint: a 10 ft wall, the top of which I could barely reach even at full extension and standing on the very top of the stepladder. Instead, I started with the roller on the centre, reasoning that somebody taller could come and do the perimeter later (plus, I was given no masking tape for the wooden ceiling beams and didn’t fancy being responsible for covering them in paint). Then one of the owners came over and told me I had to start with the outside, and complained that I hadn’t lined the paint tray with tin foil to make it easier to clean.²

I pointed out that I couldn’t reach the top with the stepladder provided, so she told me (now, not earlier, despite my height being pretty immediately apparent) that there was a taller stepladder. Unfortunately, there was only a small gap between the wall-to-be-painted and another knee-high one, and the taller stepladder wouldn’t fit in it lengthways. The owner suggested I put the ladder over the small wall, climb up the wall-facing side (i.e., away from the wall-to-be-painted) and then reach backward to paint. Feeling like this was obviously a terrible idea, but willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, I climbed up; it was exactly as awkward and ineffective as you may imagine. The owners told me to go sand the inside walls instead; one of the Swiss ended up doing the painting on a regular ladder leaning precariously against the wall, which my health insurance would definitely not have covered me for.

The sanding was not much more successful; depending on which of the two owners would come in to check, I would either be using too much pressure or not enough. Eventually, the day ended, and we headed back to the accommodation. I asked one of the Swiss girls (who was working as a nanny to the owners’ two young children) how her day had been. She replied that she had come down with something and asked to be excused due to not wanting to get the children ill, to which the owners responded only by telling her she would have to leave if she was off ill for more than a week; she quit on the spot.

We then headed off to the beach, where the girl who had initially recruited me took me aside. Apologetically, she told me that there had been some drama between the owners and volunteers in the week before I arrived (colour me unsurprised) and that the owners had just decided to get rid of everyone, including me. She said I could stay for a few more days whilst I worked out my plans, but that I would be expected to work. She left to surf and I told the other volunteers what had happened; they bought me a crate of beer and we commiserated, despite having only met the day previous, with the instant cameraderie that comes from shared hardship. We also plotted; within an hour or two, I had booked myself a hostel in Panama City.

The next morning, I awoke early. The owners had posted the evening before in a volunteer WhatsApp group (to which I hadn’t even been added yet) that I would be cleaning the swimming pool. Unfortunately for them, the first bus out of Guanico left at 6:30, so by the start of my shift I was halfway across the peninsula:

Photo by the author

I later reported the account of the girl who had recruited me, having realised that Workaway hosts don’t have to pay a membership fee and that the reason the surfcamp didn’t have a profile was almost certainly because they had been banned following poor feedback. The account was promptly suspended pending an investigation, although it does appear that this was only temporary.

A Charmless City ¶

I headed all the way to Panama City³ and Hostel Mamallena. The hostel was cheap and had good Wi-Fi, so I planned to just spend the two weeks before I was due in Darién here relaxing and catching up on work. The first red flag should have been when the receptionist thought the two-week booking had been a mistake, and advised that I probably wanted to only pay for part of it up-front. It turned out to be salient advice, though, as after my first day I knew was I unlikely to linger for long.

Having been in mostly rural areas for the past several months, I was unprepared for the miserable heat of a big city. As I looked online for things to do in Panama and plotted them on my map, I also came to realise that all of the touristy areas were located in small islands, separated by the areas of the city that one is advised to avoid both day and night.

Zipping from tourist haunt to tourist haunt by taxi didn’t sound like my kind of travelling, and I was longing to be back by the beach and nature, so after spending a few days in the weirdly antisocial hostel, I hopped on a bus back west; I was heading back to Santa Catalina.

Back to Santa Catalina ¶

The Canadian Workawayer was leaving the same day I returned (our buses passed one another on the road into town) so I missed her, but the Swiss guy and the German girl were still there; I had intentionally not told them I was coming back so as to surprise them when I showed up back in the accommodation. During my time away another German girl and a Uraguayana had joined the crew, and so I was soon back into the rhythm of watering, weeding and weekends by the sea.

Photo by the author

In long conversations with the owner (who was a fount of knowledge and rather prone to being sidetracked) we learnt about everything from the political situation in South Africa to the logistics of the drug trade in the area to the state of Panamanian infrastructure and building regulations. For example, getting planning permission requires so much time and money that the general approach of people in the country is apparently to extend their properties slowly enough to not attract attention—an extended wall one month, perhaps an awning the next—until eventually they have the desired extension as a fait accompli.

I started to notice this more and more, and came to appreciate the almost organic-looking architecture that resulted from the gradual accretion of extra structure. I also thought of Seeing Like a State and how this served a prime example of the innovations that can occur where life is less legible and the state therefore less powerful. I think there’s also an empowering element to this state of affairs; paying for architects and planning approvals is a prohibitively expensive upfront cost for most Panamanians, so this loophole allows them to develop their properties at a rate that is more flexible and affordable to them, or in other words to work all week to add a cinder block to their house.

Towards the end of this second stay, I had the opportunity to pick, wash and roast my own coffee beans; unfortunately, there was no grinder to be found, so they remain whole in my bag waiting for an opportunity to be tasted. We were also joined by another Canadian on the last couple days there, another wildland firefighter; they seem to be absolutely everywhere.

Carnevale ¶

Darién was looming, but before that came Carnevale weekend. Whilst Panama is not the country that first comes to mind when most people think Carnevale celebrations, there are several towns and cities dotted around with notable festvities. King amongst these is Las Tablas, normally a sleepy town of around 10,000 people that transforms for a long weekend into Panama’s premiere party destination. The day is spent dancing in the town centre whilst being dowsed with firehoses, whilst at night the town’s two rival queens (of Upper Street and Lower Street, respectively) compete to be crowned the Queen of Carnevale with competitive fireworks shows, dancing and huge parade floats.

In short, it sounded like it wasn’t to be missed. The other Workawayers were heading west, to Boquete and Bocas del Toro, but one of the German girls was coming east and finished at the farm only a week after I did. I headed off early and spent the week at Travellers Hostel in Chitré, mostly laying in a hammock and working on my laptop, until she came and joined me. Everything in Las Tablas was fully booked, but she had found a B&B in the nearby town of Guarare courtesy of some German travel blog.

It was easy enough to get between the two towns, so we went and partied and almost got crushed by several floats:

On the third night, we drank with a big group of Panamanians that were also staying with us, one of whom turned out to be some sort of celebrity chef. He got us all backstage entrance to a massive club, and we spent one of the drunkest nights of my life partying besides the DJ booth:

The following day I barely left the bed, and on the one after we went to the beach and I got singed rather badly. All in all, though, my second excursion to the Azuero peninsula had been markedly more successful than my first one. It was time to see if that luck could hold out.

Panama City, Take 2 ¶

The German and I headed to Panama City, this time staying in the old town of Casco Viejo. This is the main tourist area, and it really shows: the streets are pristine, the architecture cool, the cafes incredibly expensive and the police present on every street corner. However, in weird Panama City fashion, a wrong turn or going one or two blocks too far takes one straight into one of the most allegedly dangerous neighbourhoods of the cities, where there are no cops to be seen.

Photo by the author

As the German had Uber, we were much more mobile than I had been on my previous visit. We walked down the beautiful Amador Causeway, learning about the relationship between Panama and the US and the history of the Panama Canal, then ended with a visit to the (wildly pricey but fairly interesting) Biomuseo. We also went for breakfast at a cafe one morning and ended up in the middle of a large-ish protest march, which seemed to be something to do with a miners strike, but it wasn’t super clear.

Photo by the author

My second visit to Panama City was much more successful than the first one, but it really is a city where you can smell the Gini coefficient in the air.⁴ Panama as a whole is like that, with towering skyscrapers and the swish offices of multi-national banks trying to evade taxes surrounded by slums and not that far from rural villages without running water or electricity, all despite how much money the Canal brings in for the country.

After several days in Panama City, it was time for the German and I to finally part ways. I was heading to the final stop on my trans-Panamanian tour, and a place whose reputation very much preceded it: Darién.

There be Dragons ¶

Most people, be they tourists or Panamanians, would do a double take when I told them I was going to Darién. In Chitré, a Croatian guy tried to dissuade me from going by telling me it was one of the most dangerous places in the world, offered me a compass in case I got lost and gave me his number to call in case I needed help. The FCDO say to avoid the region, as does Wikivoyage, unless you have a very good reason to go. Even the people at Albrook bus terminal refused to believe that I wanted to go there, trying several times to direct me to the bus to the other Santa Fe in Veraguas province.

Part of this, I think, is the unfortunate conflation of the entire region with the Darién Gap, which by all accounts really is as dangerous as it’s made out to be. But Darién is a big place, and there’s plenty to the province before one reaches the National Park. I wonder too, particularly gauging from the reactions of the Panamanians, to what extent this is just the standard fear of a largely undeveloped region full of indigenous people that we can see expressed throughout history, from the Roman concept of the barbarians at the gate to the savage red man trope used to justify westward US expansion in the 19^th century.⁵ To hear the Panamanians tell it, Darién is a distant Mordor from which few return; pressed further, none of the people saying that had ever been.

Undeterred, I set off on the five-hour bus ride from Panama City. After crossing over several large lakes, their shores dotted by small wooden houses on stilts, the generally barren scenery of the rest of the Pan-American Highway started to give way to lush jungle. Then, all of a sudden, the colour would drain entirely and we would pass for a few minutes through a post-apocalyptic landscape of ash, the result of slash and burn agricultural practices common to the region:

Finally, after swapping for a small minibus for the final leg of the journey, I arrived in Puerto Lara, a small village populated by members of the Wounaan indigenous group. I was here to teach English, as some of the village leaders were hoping to develop the place for tourism and currently nobody spoke any. Me and the other volunteers—a German couple with their young baby, who is having a very cool childhood that he will remember nothing about—were housed in a huge recently-constructed house built in the traditional style, which doubled as a hostel for tourists.

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

Given that it was the dry season in Panama, running water was limited to a roughly 30-minute window every morning that would occur at a random time, generally between 6 and 8 am. Sometimes, there would be no water. As a result, someone would get up early and open a tap to serve as a warning; when the trickle of water was heard, we’d rush around the house to fill all of our receptacles before it cut off. We used the same water for bathing, cooking and drinking, although we boiled it before doing the latter. Behold my shower:

Photo by the author

Class times were set in theory, although it quickly became clear that the kids would just show up as and when to play and we would have to be flexible and just start teaching when there were enough present. As and when also proved to mean pretty much constantly, and the large house served as a combination nursery/playroom for much of the day. This was manageable when I could share the load with the Germans, but they left after I’d been there a week and I suddenly found myself trying to juggle a constant stream of children.

The kids were, to put it charitably, a handful. I’m unclear how responsible I would have been held if something had’ve happened to them, but I would routinely turn around to find them climbing on the outside of the building or launching each other out of hammocks directly beside the railings. One time I got back from the shops to find that they had chopped me up a papaya; it was only later that I realised I didn’t have any knives, and that there must have been a bunch of unsupervised 5–10 year olds playing around with my machete. However, lack of self-preservation and minute attention spans aside, the kids were adorable. I can’t say we made any real strides in English (which was always going to be an uphill struggle, as the kids hadn’t generally achieved literacy in Spanish until around 11 years old), but I did teach them how to tie a bunch of knots.

Photo by the author

The adults were more organised (as you might imagine) and several of them made excellent progress over the several weeks I was there. One kept asking me to translate odd phrases (e.g., I am offering free calls), so I asked why and learnt that she volunteered with the Panamanian Red Cross at a migrant reception centre by the Gap. I asked her if I would be able to join them the next time they went, but she said she’d have to ask her boss who’d have to ask his, and given the speed of Panamanian bureaucracy it was clear that nothing would be sorted by the time I left.

Photo by the author

Inbetween babysitting and teaching I worked, both on my site and on the mobile app. I am using to track my trip, and hiked the nearby trail a couple of times. My birthday came and went without much fanfare, although I did get some nice cakes from a van that would pass through the village every evening, and one of my students took me out to the local watering hole on my final night. Of all the Workaways I’ve done, I think this is the one that I most want to come back to in future to see how things have progressed; also, the arepas rellenas from the nearby Restaurante Arco Iris are to die for.

Back to Costa Rica ¶

My next destination was Nicaragua, but direct flights were ludicrously expensive (~£500 one-way for a 1h30 trip). Instead, I decided to travel by bus, which would double as a good excuse to explore some of the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. I hopped on the 5-hour bus back to Panama City with hostels booked in Panama City and David, but when I arrived at Albrook I found an overnight bus that would take me all the way to the border. I told my hostels not to wait up for me⁶ and settled in for the 12-hour ride to Changuinola, followed by a taxi to Guabito.

I was so early that I had to wait a few hours for the Panamanian immigration office to open so I could get my exit stamp. Then I walked across a bridge, pausing to appreciate the easiest and most picturesque border crossing I’ve ever encountered:

Photo by the author

From the moment I crossed the border, I was struck by just how verdant and lush the foliage was on the Costa Rican side. For the last two months, I had mostly been surrounded by the barren landscapes surrounding the Pan-American Highway, the bone-dry Azuero peninsula, the endless tracts of near-empty land used for cattle pasture and, to top it off, the ashen moonscape on the approach to Darién.

I remembered something that the South African guy had said, comparing Panama and Costa Rica. Decades ago, he said, both countries stood at a crossroads and had to decide how best to secure their futures. Panama had the Canal and all of the money that it brought in, and so decided that it didn’t need to do much at all (in what I suppose is an example of the Dutch disease). Costa Rica, on the other hand, recognised that its greatest asset was its own environment, and that protecting this would be a long-term project and require huge investment in education and environmental protection. Now, the results of Costa Rica’s phenomenal success and Panama’s short-sightedness are easily visible, despite the latter’s attempts to ape the former’s approaches in words if not in deed (e.g., illegal logging is rife in nominally protected areas like the island of Coiba).

I don’t necessarily know how accurate that all is, having only been in the country for a couple months, and obviously there are many other factors that differentiate the two countries (not least of all the six-year-long US-backed and then US-toppled Noriega dictatorship in Panama). But at least from my relatively brief experience, it seems to gel with what I’ve seen. Panama is naturally beautiful and incredibly varied, and the Panamanians generally seem to be pretty happy, but there is a lingering sense of precarity to that beauty and happiness. Just as Costa Rica apparently now exports seeds to Panama for plants that were originally endemic to the latter, I hope that some of its other positive examples can also spread to its eastern neighbour before the twin golden geese of the Canal and the worldwide tax evasion industry stop laying their shiny, shiny eggs.

Mine is an unarmed people, whose children have never seen a fighter or a tank or a warship

I’ve long wanted to visit Costa Rica, ever since learning that it was one of only a handful of countries in the world to not have a standing army. This, along with its foundational role in promoting worldwide eco-tourism and it’s famous biodiversity,¹ presented an image of a responsible nation with its priorities firmly in the right place. This was all seemingly confirmed during their 2018 elections when, at a time when most other countries were racing to see who could collapse into right-wing extremism faster and more belligerently, the Costa Rican electorate resoundingly rejected the Christian populist candidate.

So far, so good, but the proof is always in the pudding and so I wanted to experience Costa Rica first-hand.

No way, San José ¶

Flying into the capital was a shock after the pristine adobe aesthetics of Arizona. San José is, to put it charitably, a bit of a ‘hole, and it’s worth noting that this is an assessment shared by all but two people I encountered, whether gringo or Tico (the preferred endonym amongst Costa Ricans). I wonder, though, how much it’s a matter of the coat of paint used; the endless gated communities of suburban Phoenix were, functionally, the same as the omnipresent physical security measures around every building in San José (from corner shops to primary schools), but barbed wire-topped chain-link fences are visually much more striking than well-manicured golf courses and discreetly-placed CCTV cameras.

At my hostel (whose front seemed designed to deter ramming attacks) I met my first Tica, a twenty-year old girl who had never left the country and was amazed to learn that the UK has an army and not monkeys. She made a point of warning me to be careful and that not everyone here is pura vida. Later on we went looking for food and asked a guy for directions, who asked his friend, but to no avail. We walked the other way for a while before returning, only to find the guy still stood there waiting for us. He offered to lead us to the place using his phone map and we agreed, but as he led us away from the main throughfare and into the side roads my Spidey-sense started to tingle… and then he brought us to the place and went on his way. He was pura vida, after all.

The girl on the other side of the dorm was unfortunate enough to have the slats of the bunk above her keep falling onto her, and by the morning she had amassed a collection of no fewer than six laying on the floor beside her bed. I only stayed in San José for the night. I chatted to a couple Germans over breakfast and talked about meeting up with the Tica again in Panama. Then I steeled myself for an eight-hour bus ride, the standard of the on-vehicle amenities unknown.

Into the Jungle ¶

The bus ride was largely uneventful, and the scenery pretty interesting, but it ended on a bum note as a baby across the aisle from me threw up all over my shoes about half an hour from our destination. When I arrived in Puerto Jiménez it was dark, and I had a slightly sketchy-feeling 15-minute walk to get to my hostel, in large part down an unlit road.

Photo by the author

Still, though, I was not done. Puerto Jiménez was but my penultimate destination, and as I sat waiting for the bus that would take me to my final one the following morning, drinking a coffee and eating a delicious empanada (shout-out to Nano’s Diner), I took in my surroundings now that I could see them. My first time in the tropics, and it looked and felt exactly as I’d expected: lush greenery everywhere; rusting radio masts like something out of Far Cry 3; and dirt roads with potholes big enough to lose your dog in. I was a long way from the relative swishness of San José now, and the place fascinated me; I made a mental commitment to come back often.

Photo by the author

Eventually, the bus arrived, and by bus I mean a small red minibus that had certainly seen better days. On the 40-minute ride, most of which was taken at around 10 mph due to the state of the roads, I chatted to the driver in halting Spanish and took in my surroundings, from the water buffalo-looking cows to the huge trees. At one point the road narrowed to a single lane alongside the river and the driver explained that the rest of it had washed away in the recent rainfall.

Tomasz Poniży

Finally, I was in Dos Brazos, a tiny gold-mining town located at the point where the two arms of the Rio Tigre converge to form the river proper. I was here for my first volunteerstay organised via Workaway, as a house-sitter at Bolita Hostel—Costa Rica’s only clothing-optional hostel—whilst it was shut for the rainy season… except they had forgotten I was coming, and the rainy season was already about over. Not to worry, I was happy enough to do the normal volunteer work too, and I waited to be told what that would be. The path up to the hostel involved a river crossing and a steep uphill climb, described on the hostel Web site as aggressive and taking around 45 minutes in all, and I found out the hard way that US dollars do not get on well with water.

At the hostel were three couples: five Poles who had never met previously and one Greek guy. As there were no guests yet, the only jobs we had to do were generally keep the place clean and bring stuff up and down as required when making a trip. I had the dorm area to myself (unless you count the trail of leafcutter ants passing underneath my bed) and settled in to sleep.

Photo by the author

The next couple days were a little stressful, as I had to return to Puerto Jiménez to buy groceries and things I had forgotten. Things improved after this, particularly once I had adjusted to the din of the jungle at night and was better able to sleep. I started to explore the surrounding area, tackling a few of the trails and hunting for wildlife in the evening, as well as continuing to study Spanish.

At some point, and I’m not sure why, both of my big toenails fell off.

Photo by the author

Then, whilst out hiking the trails in the buff (as you do), I managed to get my phone wet and kill the display.² It was back to stress as I wandered around Puerto Jiménez the following day looking for repair stores, none of which were able to do anything with my Fairphone; I realised to my frustration that the phone and its replacement parts are only sold in Europe, and that I had paid a premium for a allegedly repairable phone that isn’t repairable in most of the world.

Realising that it would be quite a faff to set up a new phone, I looked on Workaway for a nearby host somewhere less remote. As luck would have it, I found a French couple living in Puerto Jiménez itself and, after meeting the husband in town whilst I was there looking for new phones, I had a new plan all lined up.

Puerto Jiménez ¶

So, much earlier than anticipated, I found myself back in Puerto Jiménez for a longer stay. I had a place to stay and meals provided in exchange for helping the couple around the house, painting, cleaning and walking their dogs. They had three dogs and three cats, including one kitten with whom I became best friends. As I gushed about my new pals to my two-legged friends back home, I found out that most of them were surprised and seemed to think I had something against animals; I’m not sure what I have done to garner such a reputation.

I also realised that it wouldn’t be feasible to order any specific model of phone that I actually wanted online, and so I had to settle for the cheapest that they had in the local electronics store. Thus I ended up with a Samsung Galaxy A13 which, like all normal consumer tech. fills me with disgust every time I use it. Adjusting to stock Android after using /e/OS was hard enough, but I would later discover that Samsung phones really do go above and beyond in an effort to suck as much as possible.

Photos by the author

I quickly settled in to my new routine: I would work through the morning, usually alongside the husband, and then head off to the beach in the afternoon (or, perhaps more often, say I was going to and then take a nap or get distracted by something). I was trying to put my finger on what I liked so much about the place when I read the following description on WikiVoyage:

A funky old gold mine town, main town on the tip of the peninsula, and the only small town with restaurants, bank, ATM, gas station, shops, internet cafés, airstrip, car rentals, grocery stores and crazy night life….You can also shop and see the local culture, and if you are lucky, you just might catch one of their many festivals. People here are friendly and helpful.

That’s right, I had found myself in Costa Rican Deadwood!

Photo by the author

One day I met a German tourist at the beach and we became pals, and so I added bar-hopping to my free time itinerary. For some reason we couldn’t work out, he kept getting charged more for things than me, such as paying ₡2,000 (~£4) for an espresso (compared to my ₡300–500 filter coffees) and even, one time, ₡1,000 for a black coffee that had been ₡500 at the same place the day before. Prices in general were weird, and at least one place clearly set prices in dollars and converted them into colones, leading to prices fluctuating slightly day-by-day.

Photo by the author

Our favourite haunt quickly became a beachfront dive bar called Bar de la Purraja. With his much better Spanish we invited the two barmaids to come out with us after work, and we ended up playing some frames of pool because they assumed that, as an English person, I was super into that. We also learned that whereas I—at least until I opened my mouth—could be mistaken for a Tico due to my tan and attire (shorts, flip-flops and sleeveless vests), everything about my pal screamed gringo and that that was why we were experiencing such different treatment.

Photo by the author

November came and went, and I finally shaved for the first time in a long while; I hadn’t been intending to do it for Movember, I was just lazy and testing my genetics to see if I could grow proper facial hair with enough patience (nope). I saw the Germany–Costa Rica game with a group of Germans in a bar full of Costa Ricans, and few things in my life have ever been as loud, although the French guy did put in a good effort during the England–France game later on, and the France–Argentina final. I even met up with one of the couples from Bolita as they transited through the town after finishing there, and with the ending of the rainy season I started to notice more gringos about (he says, as though he isn’t one).

Día de la Abolición del Ejército ¶

I hadn’t realised this when planning my trip, but I discovered that the the Día de la Abolición del Ejército—the national holiday celebrating the day that Costa Rica abolished its army—fell on December 5^th and was coming up soon. This was the event that first interested me in the country, and my German pal had left for pastures anew, so I decided to spend the day reading up on Costa Rican history.

The story goes that, in 1948, Costa Rica decided to abolish its entire armed forces, the President symbolically smashed through the wall of their former headquarters with a sledgehammer and all the former defence spending was redirected towards education. Costa Rica then went on to have the best 20^th and 21^st centuries of any South or Central American country, remaining peaceful in spite of the trends of the rest of the region and seeing huge leaps in its standard of living.

Of course, the reality of living without an army is a little more complex than just everyone decided we were too nice to hit. Unlike elsewhere in Latin America, Costa Rica hasn’t really ever seen the kind of leftist leader who threatens US corporate profits with the possibility of expropriation and wealth redistribution,³ so Washington was never compelled to support right-wing death squads, military dictators or genocides here. It’s easy to be a happy little hobbit when you’re not drawing Sauron’s gaze.

Plus, Costa Rica has had to bend the knee to the US a number of times, such as backing the Contras in Nicaragua under Monge. This marked the end of the Reform State period, and since then Costa Rica has followed the neoliberal economic line. Not unrelatedly, the generation of artists and writers stretching from the 1980s to now is known as the generation of disenchantment.

So, Costa Rica’s peace and prosperity is a little more complicated than it may first appear, and some of those contradictions are likely to intensify as Chinese investment in the country ramps up, threatening its thusfar successful strategy of play nice with the local nutcase. Like Japan, it will be interesting to see how long it takes for their constitutional pacifism to become a subject of debate.

Photo by the author

But, on that day, I walked the dogs along the beach and spent the rest of the morning painting the kitchen to the sounds of Israel Kamakawiwoʻole and toucans outside. It was about 30 °C, there was barely a cloud in the sky and on that day 74 years prior, Costa Rica made a very cool decision and hasn’t (yet) looked back; I celebrated with a beer on the beach.

Happy in Jiménez ¶

I wanted to find some more people to hang out with and so set myself up on Tinder. I tried Bumble too, as I’d heard good things about it and I find Tinder itself hugely unpleasant, but due to its limited penetration into Costa Rica thusfar they have ingeniously decided to disable the ability to filter based on location, making the app.  utterly useless unless I fancied a 60 km trip to San José for the sake of a date.

Photo by the author

Before he left, the German and I had gone on a night out with a Uruguayan Workawayer who was also in the area and I had been surprised to find that I could mostly follow the conversation in Spanish. After successfully managing to conduct two dates with a Tica entirely in Spanish without accidentally calling myself a jelly doughnut (although I did slash my thumb open attempting to open a coconut) I realised just how unreasonably effective a tool immersion is for language learning, having learned in a couple weeks more than I had in months of Duolingo or years of Spanish lessons at school.

Alizon

Unfortunately, that was as far as things went as our schedules never aligned again. Much of my social life for the remainder of my time there revolved around the animals, although the German did come back to visit the barmaid he’d started seeing and we all headed to the centre of town for the Festival de la Luz; then she taught me a bunch of bad words in Spanish, as is the responsibility of every language speaker when encountering a learner. On my final night with the French I cooked a risotto (with the husband later calling me le roi du risotto in his feedback on Workaway) and said goodbye to my new furry friends.

Photo by the author

It was time to return to Bolita…

Back to Bolita ¶

With my phone issues quickly sorted, I had found my thoughts regularly drifting back to Bolita. Partly this was because I kept coming into contact with it: the German had stayed there one weekend, and the Polish–Greek couple had told me about how the vibe had changed now that tourists were present. I was curious to see the change for myself, and I also didn’t have any pressing need to move on yet, so I planned to spend the holidays naked in the jungle, as everyone should.

Photo by the author

All the volunteers I had been with before were gone, replaced by a Swiss guy and two pairs of Americans, each of ambiguous couple-ness. Also present now was the owner, who had been away in Canada before. Now that we were out of house-sitting mode we were excacipected to do normal volunteer work for 20 hours per week, but after a rambling three-hour briefing and repeated questions we were no clearer on how we were expected to make up 100 hours per week between us when there was a ratio of one volunteer per guest, and the guests were all pretty tidy.

There was a lot of talk about there being loads of projects, but never any information, and the one time I tried to take some initiative (by hanging up a poster we’d been told to hang up), I got into the owner’s bad books because I had used a knife rather than a hole punch (though none were available) and had apparently put it up in the wrong place. Someone else tried to put it up on another wall and it again got torn down, and the owner seemed to assume it was my doing again. The poster was still laying on the floor when I left, where I expect I shall remain until the jungle steals it away one windy day.

Two of the Americans were coming off the back of a season spent wildland firefighting in Washington and, as someone who one considered applying to be a firewatch lookout, I immediately decided I wanted a piece of that action; one for another trip. Now that the rest of the world had effectively halted for holiday period, I was able to really sink into the tranquil jungle retreat vibes and enjoy the glacial pace of life there.

Photo by the author

There had been a fair amount of drinking with the house-sitting crew, and I kept that tradition alive with the new group by bringing a couple litres of rum and cacique with me. By day I lay in a hammock or went hiking, by night we drank and played card and/or drinking games. One advantage of not being with a bunch of couples was that people were more amenable to cooking together, and I even organised a couple film viewings: Clara Sola, because I wanted to watch a Costa Rican film; and Y tu mamá también, because I love it (and now I want to go on a Mexican road trip). The owner disappeared shortly before Christmas Eve, never to return before my own departure, and as a result we basically self-organised ourselves exactly as we had done when there were no guests and didn’t bother to track our hours.

For Christmas Day itself I organised a volunteer meal back down in Dos Brazos, and on my final morning there I woke everyone up at 4 a.m.  so we could hike up to a viewpoint and watch the sun rising over the Golfo Dulce:

Panama, Ho! ¶

I had heard enough people tell me that I should go to Bocas del Toro that I decided to cut short my second stay at Bolita so I could spend New Year’s there; I felt I was overdue some proper partying.

Photo by the author

Before that I spent the night in Puerto Jiménez, and the hostel owner—a Canadian-accented Scotsman with a big bushy beard, who seemed to have a side hustle of videocalling children at the end of December as Santa on holiday—told me and a pair of Dutch girls who were heading the same way how we could make it all the way to Bocas in a single day.

The next day I said goodbye to Costa Rica, having seen an awful lot of one very small part of it, and certain that I would be back some time for the rest.