Vinales
Lost in Smoke of Time
Lost
in the smoke of time
Reina
María Rodríguez, Cuban poet and novelist, author
of La Foto del Invernadero (Casa de las Americas prize, 1998)
and Te daré de comer como a los pájaros (La
Habana, Letras Cubanas 2000). (Source: UNESCO.org)
The
Viñales Valley, near the western tip of Cuba, is a
magical landscape of hills and caves where life centres on
growing tobacco. A Cuban writer recalls discovering this World
Heritage site through books well before setting foot there
In
the west side of the Cordillera de Guaniguanico, at the foot
of the Sierra de los Órganos, lies a region of limestone
outcrops known as mogotes. These huge round-topped hummocks
rising out of the ground emerged from the sea more than two
million years ago and were formed during the Jurassic period.
Born in the vicissitudes of history, the land still bears
the marks of precipices, chasms and seams carved out by erosion.
Tobacco grows in the valley—strange red leaves almost
starved by the salty soil but brought to life by permanent
sunshine.
I
always dreamed of the Viñales Valley but never ventured
there. In school I could touch the lush tobacco leaves pictured
in textbooks and see the caterpillars that live off them, slowly
and avidly taking on the aroma of tobacco before devouring the
plant.
My
life was that of the concrete city, though the sensation left
by dew on my hand was so strong that I still recall it as
if it were real. The leaf, bright and green like a child,
turns a deep toasted brown before it is smelt, chewed or burnt,
becoming like time itself and ending up, in old age, as wisps
of smoke.
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Farmers,
most of whom came from the Canary Islands, arrived around
1800 and began cultivating tobacco across the region, which
is commonly known as the Vuelta Abajo. Two hundred years later,
tobacco is still the lifeblood of the Viñales Valley,
which produces 661,000 quintals of it every year. Only the
best leaves get sent to Havana, where hundreds of workers
called torcedores and anilladores handroll them into cigars.
Cuba produces 65 million cigars a year, packed in cedarwood
boxes and exported to the entire world.
Growing
tobacco calls for patience. Some even say that the plant grows
better if you speak to it. Once the seeds are sown (between
October and December), the moment to reap and pack is of critical
importance, marking all the difference between acidity, sourness
or waste-product.
The
valley is like its tobacco discreet, thrifty and tranquil,
stuck in the same serene pocket of time as its villagers.
People who have never been to the Viñales Valley, in
the Cuban province of Piñar del Río, should
know that it boasts a unique variety of plant and animal life,
some of it in danger of extinction, such as the cork palm,
the agabe, the macusey hembra, the alligator oak and the dragon
tree. Unaccustomed to the ways of civilization and to music
unlike their own songs, the valley’s birds also come
in a kaleidoscope of species, with names as evocative as the
pine-forest grass quit, the mockingbird and the totí.
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Returning
to Viñales is a bit like returning to a museum. A silence
hangs over it, a mysterious calm that dwells in the early
morning mist. In Viñales village we visit a church
built in the last century with sombre pews that have been
repaired countless times. The musty odour mingles with the
smell of warmed-up food. Heavy rainfall in the wet season
has spoiled the splendid facades of the houses, which now
look like faded mosaics.
And
Cuban hands, always touching and caressing things, cherishing
the past, have worn out the fine wooden railings at the front
of the houses. As in every village in my country, Viñales
also has a central square—a byword for order amid confusion.
Four kilometres from the village, on one side of the Dos Hermanas
(Two Sisters) mojote, stands the Mural of Prehistory, a impressive
120-metre high fresco painted by Cuban artist Leovigildo González,
disciple of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Depicted are
the animals and other creatures that lived in the valley in
prehistoric times.
People
who have not read the poem of José Lezama Lima (1912-76),
Bajo el arco de Viñales (Beneath the arch of Viñales),
or have never seen the paintings of Cuban artist Domingo Ramos
or contemplated the Mural of Prehistory, should know that
this valley, which rose from the bottom of the ocean near
the western tip of the island, is above all a place of art,
a site where Nature provides the frame and waits for the painter
to be seated.
But
how does one take leave of the valley? Through its cliffs,
its hollows? Through the passage in a mojote and its columns
of gentle stalagmites? Through the long line of big-belly
palm trees with their fiery plumes lit by summer? Through
its chattering streams full of blind fish? Through the echoes
of cockfights left in an old sugar factory? Or through a cheap
painting on the yellow wall of a restaurant somewhere in Havana’s
tourist district? Which path home is best?
Where
Nature invites painters to take place
Vinales home
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