Trinidad's old sugar mills still interest visitors.
By Doreen Hemlock
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted April 1 2007
In its heyday in the early 1800s, when sugar was king in the Caribbean,
the sugar mill valley in central Cuba boomed with wealth, dazzling
visitors with sprawling hacienda homes and even a watchtower rising
nearly 15 stories high.
But Cuba's wars of independence in the late 1800s ruined local business,
shifting sugar production to other regions and leaving the adjacent town
of Trinidad stuck in a colonial time warp, with its cobblestone streets,
courtyard homes and impressive Baroque churches.
Now, Cuba's communist government seeks to revive the once sugar-rich
zone through tourism, capitalizing on the U.N.'s designation in 1998 of
the valley and town as World Heritage Sites.
Locals feel proud that their former backwater now draws a steady stream
of foreign visitors, helping homeowners who rent rooms to tourists,
residents who find jobs in restaurants and shops, plus artisans who make
paintings, tablecloths, drums, pottery and other souvenirs. And
officials cheer that income from tourism helps restore cultural
treasures, from decaying hacienda homes to colonial art -- two things
that have languished for lack of cash.
Yet there's a long way to a boom here, with tourist income still too
little to revive the flagging region. And many residents also worry that
tourism is stoking inflation and social tensions.
Only two hacienda homes in the sugar mill valley have been restored for
tour groups to date, with work slowly under way on a couple more, said
Victor Echenagus–a, 62, a painter and museum specialist at the Office to
Conserve the City.
"We have the will, politically and technically, but sometimes what
delays us is economics," Echenagus–a said.
Cuba now produces a fraction of the sugar it once did -- perhaps 1.5
million tons this past harvest season, down from about 8 million tons a
year in the 1970s. In the past decade, tourism surpassed sugar as a
source of foreign currency, and dozens of old and inefficient sugar
mills were permanently closed.
But in Trinidad, the former riches from sugar and the potential for
tourism merge, with the nearly 15-story watchtower at the former Manaca
Iznaga plantation as a visitor magnet.
Decried by some in its day as ostentatious, the tower stood as a lookout
for the Iznaga family. Originally from Spain's Basque resion, the
Iznagas could climb to the top and see the vast sugar lands and some 15
of the valley's 57 mills, said Ramon Conrado, a bartender and resident
historian at the family's former estate.
Three bells in the tower, each with a different sound, rang out
messages. The large bell signaled the start and end of work; the medium
one, a holiday; and the small one, Easter week. The large and medium
ones rung together told of a slave escape; the large and small together,
a slave rebellion; and all three at once meant an invasion by pirates or
other intruders and a call to defend the zone against ransacking and
pillaging.
From atop the tower, visitors still can see the undulating hills of the
valley, some planted in sugar and other crops, some with cattle. Below
stand former warehouses and slave quarters.
Some days, more than 1,000 people stop at the Iznaga plantation. The
majority are Europeans and Canadians; a few Americans visit, though most
are banned from Cuba under Washington's decades-old embargo.
Conrado likes that foreigners come to experience his homeland and learn
its history, but he worries about the influx, too. He said that Castro
would never have embraced tourism were it not for the demise of the
Soviet Union and the end of Soviet subsidies that sent Cuba's economy
crashing a decade ago into an era of shortages known as the "Special
Period."
"The Special Period brought us so many problems that we had to turn to
tourism to keep the socialist revolution alive," Conrado said. "But
tourism in some ways increases inequality. I can make perhaps $10 in
tips in a day at this tourist restaurant, while a cane cutter makes
maybe 40 cents a day. Socialism seeks equality for all."
Yet residents of this colonial area of roughly 75,000 people see no
return to the heyday of sugar centuries back.
"Sugar is expensive to make. In tourism, you invest less and gain more,"
said artisan Juan Alberto Santander, 49, one of a well-known family of
clay craftsmen in Trinidad who have benefited from the recent tourist
surge. "And at least here, we have sugar history as a visitor draw."
Doreen Hemlock can be reached at dhemlock@sun-sentinel.com.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/travel/print/sfl-ztrinidadxapr01,0,1566299.story?coll=sfla-travel-print
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