I didn't see anything "Cuban" in Cuba.
But I did see lots of other interesting things.
So keep reading, because there's some coolness here...
I got up at 7:00 a.m. on Friday morning (my friends all know that I am a night person, who works and plays at night, and getting up that early is torture for me), and took the usual array of busses and trains to O'Hare airport with little mishap. Most of the rest of the 11-member band and the crew were there waiting (Gary and Jeff the singer come from LA; Danny and Beth the husband and wife drums/percussion team live in Orlando; Scott the other sound engineer lives in San Francisco, and the other seven band members and two crew guys live in Chicago).
The flight landed by 3:00 p.m. or so, and we found a shuttle waiting to take us to Disney.
I had NO IDEA we were playing Disney the day before GitMo. I had just been told we were playing "Orlando".
Imagine thie irony to discover that we were doing the Magic Kingdom, the Happiest Place on Earth, the night before the site of the world's most notorious and controversial prison! No one in our entourage commented on this. Out loud.
We went to the place where we were being housed for the night, which was the Coronado Resort, part of the GIGANTIC Disney complex, which is the size of a town. In addition to several theme parks, there are golf courses, and a bunch of different resorts, each of which occupies many acres. Disney has its own freeway exit, and the road on the end of the exit ramp goes straight into the isolated Disney area, and no where else. It is kind of creepy. If you are in Disney, you are stuck there. There is no escape. So I was to be stranded at the Coronado resort all night (the gig was the next day) with no opportunity to leave.
Coronoado Resort
I was also bummed that I'd have to spend a ton of cash eating overpriced Disney food for the next 48 hours.
But then, as we were checking in to our rooms (paid for by the concert promoters, of course) one of our contact people came up, and gave each of us two Disney gift cards valued at $80 each, and said we could use them to buy anything in the park. The idea was that they were for food, but we all know that even at Disney, no single person would spend $160 on food in two days.
Some of the people who have kids ran off to the gift shops, but me and some of the single fellas in the band and crew immediately recognized that our bar tabs, as well as our meals, would be free.
Now, Danny and Beth (locally-based drums/percussion team) were playing in the big Disney Christmas show that night. As much as I genuinely like both of them, and also respect their considerable talent, seriously, I had no desire to go into the Disney park and watch the Christmas show. Modern Disney is just lame. I really don't like anything about it. But I knew from reading a book called Tiki Road Trip, that Disney also has a Polynesian Resort with a luau every night. So I boarded the (free) shuttle bus and went from the Coronado Resort to the Polynesian Resort, transferring from bus to monorail along the way. It took a freakin' hour, and you can bet that there were shrieking kids on the bus, the whole way.
I got to the Polynesian Resort at 5:00, and wandered around, reluctantly admitting to myself that it was pretty cool (but that said, I'd never pay to stay there). I found the luau area at 5:15, and discovered that the luau starts at 5:15. It was $50, but guess what - I didn't spend a dime thanks to that $160 worth of gift cards. The place was full, but since I was alone, they found a seat for me - front row, center. Keep in mind that I am six-foot-four with a bald head and wear mostly black. Sitting conspicuously in the front row of a Disney show looking the way I do, and being by myself, I had to endure a few questioning looks from the nearby Mississippi tourists. I am sure that a few of them labeled me as some sort of prevert, and they'd be right - except for the fact that my perversions have nothing to do with their (or any) children. So to hell with them. The food is all-you-can-eat, and doesn't suck, and better yet, wine is included too. Four glasses later, I was enjoying the hell out of the luau, which includes some reasonably talented hula dancers, and one of the best fire knife performers I have ever seen. And I have seen a lot of fire knifer performers. The fire knife dude had a lot of nasty looking scars too. Once word got out that my appearance could be explained by a job in the music industry and my association with someone famous (somehow this makes it all right), I was off the hook for the look, and everyone wanted to talk to me about Gary. I didn't give them the satisfaction, politely dodging questions as I made my way for the door.
It was all over by 7:30, so I caught a bus to Pleasure Island, which sounds like it might be a house of ill repute, but is in reality Disney's reasonably (extremely) sanitized and chaste zone for clubs and shopping. It took a freakin' hour, and you can bet that there were shrieking kids on the bus, the whole way.
I discovered that the seven clubs on the Island each have a $12 cover, and I didn't quite want to squander my gifted funds on that. They all looked really lame anyway. The only free one is an "Irish pub" where a band made of fiddle, accordian, drum, and acoustic guitar were playing. They also have a platform in the middle of the room where a chick comes out and does a "Riverdance" thing every half hour or so. Another few glasses of free wine, and I was fine (and my first $80 card was essentially gone). I wandered around the Virgin megastore and also looked at some of the other crap they have on Pleasure Island, and then just decided to pack it in for the night. I caught the shuttle bus back to the Coronado (It took a freakin' hour, etc. etc), where a group of band and crew guys were drinking at the bar.
All of this, and I was in bed shortly after 10:00 p.m.!
The gig on Saturday was in the ballroom at the Coronado, a 2-minute walk from my room. After a lunch with Kirk the trumpet player and Mari Anne the singer, I made it to the venue at my appointed time of noon to discover a really great sound system. "Ah", I thought, "This is going to be a good gig". Problem was that the guys setting up the system were completely clueless, refused to give us any 'hussle', and half of the gear was broken, or was the wrong stuff, or was plugged in wrong. So Scott (the other sound guy) and I spent all day troubleshooting and repairing, and calling our contacts in Orlando to get new gear delivered. We ended up like five hours behind schedule.
In spite of, rather than because of, the local sound system techs, we got things working, and made the show happen.
Basically.
Exhausted from busting ass all day, we had a good dinner, and then I managed an hour's nap before the gig. I also bought a bunch of food "to go", to eat on our upcoming travel days. There is SO much stuff to buy at Disnay, and there wasn't a single thing there that I wanted, even for free. I gave the unused portion of my second and final $80 gift card to Beth, who lives locally and can use it at some point.
Turns out that the show was for a convention of disabled veterans, so there were all these guys there with fake legs, or wheelchairs, or horribly disfigured faces and limbs from being hideously burned. Gary made a nice speech, as he always does when we play for the military, thanking them for their sacrifices. At one point this huge, crazy bug flew down and landed on the keyboard. Ben (the keyboard player) kept playing, but this giant insect, that looked like a big green leaf, hung out and poked around on the keys for like five or six songs.
Gary and his new friend.
As always, the audience had no idea what sort of torture Scott and I had been through all day, and most (if not all) of the tech glitches that happened during the show were transparent to the people watching it.
Making sure that this is the case is my job.
The band put on as good a show as always, ending at about midnight. Completely exhausted, I fell into a deep sleep by 1:00 a.m.
This didn't last long, because...
The alarm clock failed to go off at 5:00 a.m., so I got a phone call at 5:30, wondering why I wasn't in the lobby with everyone else to get on the bus bound for Jacksonville. Fortunately, I had packed the night before, leaving my clothes for the day laid out, so I managed to take a record-fast shower, skipped the shave, got dressed, and was in the lobby in under ten minutes!
The bus wasn't even there yet, so I was off the hook.
There was a dense fog covering everything, and it was still dark.
Sleep (on what turned out to be a regular passenger van) was impossible, I was too tired to read, and had no appetite so early in the morning. So I stared out the window for three hours, and I watched the sun come up, turning the fog and sky all sorts of interesting colors.
We arrived at the military base near Jacksonville, and boarded a plane for Git-Mo. It was a military plane, but it looked more or less like a regular commercial airliner, except maybe not as comfortable. No stewardesses or beverage service, of course. There was a coleman cooler on one of the seats full of bite-sized candy bars. The pilot was friendly and was wisecracking on the sound system the whole way; turns out that our return flight the next day was his very, very last flight, ever, before retiring. The flight was two and a half hours. In addition to the fourteen people in our entourage, there were some civilians going to see their families who are stationed on the base.
Our first glimpse of Cuba from the air.
Our first glimpse of Cuba from the ground.
When the plane landed, we boarded another bus to go to a marina, and then took a boat across the titular Guatanamo Bay. The day was hot and sunny, but the breeze on the water was cool, and it was beautiful. The crescent-shaped bay was lined with mangrove swamps. The sunlight on the water was mesmerizing, with sparkles like stars forming and vanishing on the waves left in the boat's wake.
MariAnne on the boat.
It was 1:00 p.m. by the time we got to the other side, and yet another bus took the band to lunch and then for a tour of the base. Scott and I had to miss this in order to go set up the show. They had some sandwiches waiting for us, and they were awful, served with cold fries and brown catsup and nasty artificially sweetened iced tea. The guy who drove us to the outdoor stage area was pretty nice, and said he'd be our driver all day. We'll see him again later. The coolest thing was spotting wild iguanas along the road. We stopped and checked one out. She didn't run away, we were able to get just a few feet away and observe her. Our driver said that the sex of the animal could be determined by the spines along the iguana's back.
The show was outdoors, and there was no canopy over the stage. It was 95 degrees and very humid by that point, and the sun was baking the stage and the equipment (and us). The sound system was an ancient 1970s pile of trash, but the guys who were there to build it were on top of things. They'd flown in from Milwaukee three days earlier to try to get the system relatively up to snuff. They busted ass and did their best. This was sort of the opposite of Coronado: at that show there was an excellent system being run by idiots (so it sucked), and at this one there was a crappy system being run by pros - but it still wasn't completely up to muster. The system was just too archaic.
By the time the band showed up for sound check a few hours later, we had things running pretty well, but of course problems arose, were handled, and then arose again. This sound system was like a hydra - every time we solved one problem, twice as many arose to take their place.
After sound check Scott and I had less than an hour to duck into our quarters, eat, rest, and get back to the gig. Our day was already fourteen hours long and counting, we'd been in the hot sun for the past five or six of these hours, and our dinner was scarfed down in the room after taking fast turns in the shower. Our same driver pal from earlier took us to where we were staying, and offered to give us a tour of the base. We didn't have time, but he said that he'd drive us around after the gig.
The show was a real challenge - usually the three singers - Mari Anne, Gina, and Jeff - each have their own wireless mics, but this time (due to some of the afternoon's tech issues) only Gina had a wireless; Jeff and Mari Anne each had two wired mics placed at different spots on the stage (the show is dynamic and complicated, and all three singers sing from different positions on the stage at various times). Mari Anne grabbed the wrong mic a few times, which effected all of the band members stage mixes, since the mic was tuned for Jeff... well, this is getting too technical, but it was a mess. I was really happy when it was over.
After cleaning up the stage, Scott and I found our driver and he took us on the promised base tour. It was after midnight, and we had to be up early again the next morning, but Scott and I are both die-hard explorers, and we both wanted to see the base. We learned that 8,000 to 10,000 people live on the base, which was founded around 1940. It is on a peninsula on Cuba that due to some complicated series of treaties, must be tolerated by the Cuban government. There are two fences - one built by Cuba and one built by America - that cut the peninsula off from the rest of Cuba. There is a narrow strip of no-man's land between the fences.
The fence dividing the navy base from Cuba.
The driver said that no one from the base ever goes into Cuba for any reason. He said that no one would risk losing their job, or worse. I sensed that this wasn't an official line that he had to recite, he sounded like he meant it. He did say that there was a half dozen Cubans who had jobs on the base, since they had been working there since before Castro took over Cuba, and were (literally) grandfathered into their jobs. These 80-year-old duffers are bussed in every morning (at the US taxpayer's expense, of course), and sit there doing non-jobs all day, and are bussed back every night. They all refuse to retire since they don't have to actually do any work, and since they're feeding their entire extended families from this income that they make doing nothing, and have been doing so since the 1950s. As each one dies, that's one less Cuban working on-base. Eventually there will be none.
This base is like almost all of the other military bases that I have been on since April (about a dozen or so), in that it seems in many respects like a small village, a suburb of any town, except that the people living there are all employed by the same person. Not unlike Disney really, except with tanks and jet fighters and guns and bombs instead of rides and men in mouse outfits. There is a bowling alley, a movie theater, some fast food restaurants, a few bars, day care centers, etc. The entire time I was on base, I never felt like I was in Cuba. I may as well have been at the bases in Seattle, Missouri, or Oklahoma that I have visited with this band. There were no Cuban people, no Spanish or bilingual signs, and certainly no cigars or rum of a Cuban variety, that I was able to see. There was a beautiful bay, a lot of wildlife, and the same sort of courteous and helpful military people that I have found at all of the other bases.
We did not see the actual prison, but our driver did take us past the tribunal building where the fates of the prisoners is decided. Our driver also took us to a part of the base that was abandoned. He had grown up here, in what was basically a housing development at one point. It was on the oppoiste point on the crescent from the rest of the base, and we could see the lights of the base across the water. Here, on this side, it was abandoned. Driving up bumpy gravel roads, we saw two-foot tall brown grass sprouting from the concrete foundations of houses that had been completely erased. This had once been an entire neighborhood, and now it was nothing but some cracked and broken rectangles of concrete with the underbrush taking over and reclaiming it. The road was barely there anymore. Mister driver got a little melancholy talking about growing up in this ex-military housing development.
The ex-neighborhood was located by the desalination plant. The Git-Mo area of Cuba has no natural source for clean water, so the Americans there have to make their own fresh water artificially. Part of the US tension with Cuba apparently originally stemmed from Castro cutting off the US water supply in order to make the Americans leave. Instead, we just invented a desalination plant to make the abundant seawater drinkable.
Also near by were the remains of a pier. Scott and driver man and I got out of the van and went by the water. The pier was part of the abandoned housing area, and was in just as bad condition as the rest of the area. Large sections of the concrete were missing, and if we weren't careful, we would have fallen through to the water twenty feet below. The water was emerald green and perfectly clear, we could see huge fish swimming around, each of them perhaps a yard long. Above, the stars were phenomenal, the sky perfectly clear. Thousands and thousands of them. I could have stayed there for hours, just looking up, but the others were ready to move on. The tide was low, and as we walked back to the van, our feet crunched a gigantic field of coral chunks and shattered shells washed up on the shore. I took a little piece of coral.
Back on the road, the driver spotted a wild boa constrictor on the tarmac, trying to get some warmth. It was just a baby, maybe 18 inches long. Scott picked it up and then we shooed it into the grass. Boas are actually fairly docile animals, and are not poisonous.
Scott and his new friend.
We also saw some of these things called banana rats, which aren't rats at all, but are more like a possum or something. We saw bunches of those.
So, I didn't get to see where the terrorists are caged, but I did see enough wild animals to fill a zoo: banana rats, iguanas, boa constrictors, giant fish, and also a huge toad, all in their natural habitats. There are manatees in the bay too, but we didn't spot any of those. Oh, and there are some sort of buzzards or something that circle overhead all of the time. National freakin' Geographic.
I got back to my room at about 1:00 a.m., and had to be up at 7:00 a.m. If you're keeping track, that's less than six hours of sleep, and less than four the previous night - after long and brutal work days that lasted more or less all of my waking hours except for the ones spent travelling. Any of you who think the music biz is glamorous should have that notion sufficiently dispelled by now.
On Monday, I was taken in a van to the place where everyone else was staying (for some reason Scott and I were not housed with everyone else), and then got into a shuttle van with everyone else. We drove to the marina, boated back over the lovely bay, shuttle bussed it to the airport, got on the plane, flew to Jacksonville, got another shuttle (third one today, so far) to the civilian airport in Jacksonville, sat there for three hours (there is actually an art gallery in the airport, part of a public art program, which is surprising for such a small town in the culturally deficit state of Florida... the gal who runs it is really cool too), flew to Chicago, and then I got a cab home. Normally, I need to take two CTA busses and one "L" train to get home from the airport, but I was carrying some band equipment that Scott normally takes care of, and taking it on the Chicago city bus would not have been do-able. So I get to bill Gary for the cab. I was really freakin' glad to be home!
Four days felt like about two weeks, and it probably felt like you just spent twice as long as that reading this, so without further rambling, I leave you to your holiday festivities.
| I
have
maintained
this web site since
1995. I write and create photos because I enjoy it. People tell me they enjoy reading this site, so I keep it going. However... This site has cost me a lot of hours, and a lot of money. And, unlike my writing for magazines or books, there is no publisher sending me checks for the work I do on this site. So... |
Tydirium
Multimedia
Left Orbit Temple Tiki Road Trip Big Stone Head Send e-mail to James Last updated on Otober 05, 2007 |
| If
you find my
writing to be entertaining, valuable, insightful, or if you'd rather just attempt to bribe me to go away, please consider a donation, in any amount. (perhaps the same amount as a magazine subscription or a book). Just click the button below, and it'll take you to PayPal. |
|
"Tiki Bar Review Pages", "Tiki Road Trip", "Tydirium Multimedia", "Left Orbit Temple", "Chester Century", "Big Stone Head", "TiPSY Factor", "Johnny Clash", "Tiki TV", and "Blue Harvest Magazine" are trademarks of James A. Teitelbaum |
All material on this website is © Copyright 1994-2007 by James A. Teitelbaum. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use is a violation of applicable laws. |