Adventures on the road in a Cuban taxi colectivo

“Cuba is broken,” Gloria says. “Familias’ broken. How will our children take care of us in our old age when they live in America or Europe? We were so hopeful with Obama. Now we are uncertain. I am very frightened.”

My taxi is late. I’m headed to Vinales, land of tobacco, Cuban cigars, coffee beans, banana trees and limestone mountains. Gloria, my host in Havana, and I take the opportunity to visit while we wait sitting on her patio in the warm Cuban sun.

She tells me how frightened she is for her outspoken daughter who lives in Florida. Her daughter is contemptuous of recent elections in America. Gloria worries about her daughter’s openness on Facebook. “I say to her, you must be quiet how you feel,” she said. “Stop writing on Facebook how you think.” Her coffee eyes fill with tears.

“She say to me, ‘Mama, this is not Cuba. Tranquillo.’”

I try to assuage her feelings, but I am inadequate. Gloria speaks more openly about corruption in Cuba, the fear of speaking her mind and the hopes the people had that may be dashed since the U.S. elections.

She calls the taxi driver. She says he mumbled something about military operations in the streets holding up traffic.

Gloria lives in Miramar, the wealthier section of Havana. As I get to know her better, I sense her intelligence and reserve, but most of all a mother’s heartache for her daughter, her only child, who lives in another country she cannot visit.

A dull black 1955 Buick Century bat-mobile stuffed with people rolls up to the curb, shudders to a stop and belches thin blue exhaust. My shared taxi, called a taxi colectivo in Cuba has arrived.

Gloria raises her eyebrows as the driver opens the trunk and crams in my suitcase. She says good-bye, kisses my cheeks and sneaks a tenuous glance at the inside of the Buick.

“You have my number,” she says. “Call if you need anything.”

Tom and Luga from Germany are scrunched up in the front seat with the driver, whose name I never got, who never talked once the whole three hours, and Joe and Lisa from Australia are in the backseat. I stow my thermal lunch bag on the back floor with my diabetic food — eggs, ham and cheese — with my camera and purse and we are off.

The bat-mobile has seen happier days. While other Fonzie-type cars shine brightly in the

“Cuba is broken,” Gloria says. “Familias’ broken. How will our children take care of us in our old age when they live in America or Europe? We were so hopeful with Obama. Now we are uncertain. I am very frightened.”

My taxi is late. I’m headed to Vinales, land of tobacco, Cuban cigars, coffee beans, banana trees and limestone mountains. Gloria, my host in Havana, and I take the opportunity to visit while we wait sitting on her patio in the warm Cuban sun.

She tells me how frightened she is for her outspoken daughter who lives in Florida. Her daughter is contemptuous of recent elections in America. Gloria worries about her daughter’s openness on Facebook. “I say to her, you must be quiet how you feel,” she said. “Stop writing on Facebook how you think.” Her coffee eyes fill with tears.

“She say to me, ‘Mama, this is not Cuba. Tranquillo.’”

I try to assuage her feelings, but I am inadequate. Gloria speaks more openly about corruption in Cuba, the fear of speaking her mind and the hopes the people had that may be dashed since the U.S. elections.

She calls the taxi driver. She says he mumbled something about military operations in the streets holding up traffic.

Gloria lives in Miramar, the wealthier section of Havana. As I get to know her better, I sense her intelligence and reserve, but most of all a mother’s heartache for her daughter, her only child, who lives in another country she cannot visit.

A dull black 1955 Buick Century bat-mobile stuffed with people rolls up to the curb, shudders to a stop and belches thin blue exhaust. My shared taxi, called a taxi colectivo in Cuba has arrived.

Gloria raises her eyebrows as the driver opens the trunk and crams in my suitcase. She says good-bye, kisses my cheeks and sneaks a tenuous glance at the inside of the Buick.

“You have my number,” she says. “Call if you need anything.”

Tom and Luga from Germany are scrunched up in the front seat with the driver, whose name I never got, who never talked once the whole three hours, and Joe and Lisa from Australia are in the backseat. I stow my thermal lunch bag on the back floor with my diabetic food — eggs, ham and cheese — with my camera and purse and we are off.

The bat-mobile has seen happier days. While other Fonzie-type cars shine brightly in the

Cuban sun, painted powder-puff pinks, greens and blues, polished to a mirror finish, this one is a dull black. The surface is rough painted-over rust. It belongs in a Stephen King novel.

The door handle on the inside next to me is missing, and the handle to the cracked window dangles from its hinge. Joe, Lisa and I joke that maybe I can take the window handle all the way off and give it to them to attach to their window as they don’t have a handle at all. I can’t roll my window down anyway, not only because the handle is broken, but because the window is so cracked I fear it will crumble if I try. So, I leave it be and consign myself to a hot and sweaty ride.

Immediately an achy headache pierces my brain as exhaust spews up from the trunk through a hole in the back dashboard behind my head. We never could figure out why there was a hole directing exhaust into the cab’s interior.

Our driver pulls over to consult with people on the street for directions to the Autopista Havana-Pinar del Rio highway headed west.

He doesn’t know where the main highway is?

Joe and Lisa tell me he had to ask for directions several times in Havana looking for the couple up front. This had consumed two hours. No wonder he was late.

At least the front windows are open and we get a breeze, especially when the driver is going full tilt at 100 kilometers per hour over the rough surface of the central two-lane divided highway. We pass horse-drawn buggies, oxen and their carts, pedestrians and the occasional bus or taxi.

I look at the horse-drawn carts driven by cigar-chewing guajiros — Cuban farmers — on the side of the highway with envy as they flick their whips lightly across the horse’s backs at a pace that seems far more sensible.

There isn’t any shoulder except on the right side of the road, but that appears to be reserved for bicyclists, hitch hikers, horses and oxen. This does not stop our driver from leaving the steering wheel to its own devices as he picks dirt from under his fingernails. I sit in the back on the right side and watch his every move.

Half-way to Vinales, as the emerald-green mountains vanish into banana and tobacco plantations, I watch in horror as our driver opens his cell phone with both hands, nonchalantly takes the battery out and bangs it on the dashboard.

Later, Tom tells me he steered with his knees. The answer as to why he had been late picking me up had nothing to do with military exercises but a dead cell phone with no GPS access, leaving us with a baffled driver and the horrors of dead batteries in the technological age.

We stop for lunch at a gas station takeout food stand and stretch our legs. Maybe he needs gas. Yep. He fills a gallon-sized can with petro, opens the trunk, moves the luggage around and squeezes it in just under the hole that exits up into the back dashboard behind where I sit. He slams the trunk shut.

I check the tires as we have been rolling around as if we are on the high seas. I’m worried a tire will fly off at 100 kilometers per hour, and we will end up in a heap of fire on the side of the road. The tires look like they were ripped off a tank, so I settle down. I remind myself I am a nervous backseat driver to begin with, so shut up.

An hour from Vinales, three people run onto the road and flag us down.

Bandits. I’m sure of it. The sun is in my eyes; I am unable to see that they are the policia. Same thing. “Everyone got your passports?” I ask my car mates.

The driver shows no emotion as two cops ask for his identification, take his paperwork and saunter back to a police car sitting off to the side of the road under a palm tree. I make out one word, “girar,” which means to turn around. Are they telling him to turn around and go back? Did he not have the correct licenses to be driving us?

The driver exits the car.

“Is this when we are supposed to give a bribe?” asks Tom up front. I realize I’m not the only one concerned with this journey, this car, this driver. And now, these police officers.

The driver returns and without emotion gets back in the car, turns over the engine and for the next 5 miles drives as if he is sane, until we are far enough from the police for him to place his heavy foot back on the gas pedal.

Surely either the Virgin Mary glued to his dashboard or the black and orange Halloween witch dangling from his mirror will protect us.

The turnoff to Vinales, a one-lane road, has left us with only 32 kilometers to go. We just might make it. Shiny blue and white tourist buses infest the road. Children dodge 1950s cars, and we hold our breath as our driver navigates the terrain, honking at horse-drawn buggies, whips around walking grandmas and the tour buses that clearly do not belong on this road as well as cigar-smoking, straw-hatted guarjiros on horses.

We are not in Kansas anymore, Toto — or in Havana.

The road is flanked on each side with hobbit houses, a jumble of fuchsia-pink, yellow, powder-blue and turquoise houses with pink columns holding up the orange tiled roofs.

The yellow front parches all have rocking chairs. And the inside of homes — we see because all the doors are open — are a light blue. Clothes, especially sheets, whip in the breeze on clothes lines, chickens and goats, previously missing in Havana, scratch and nibble at the tropical greenery that hug the hillsides.

Each home has a welcoming sign that says, “Case Jose y Gertrude,” or whatever the owner’s name is, and two rocking chairs, just beckoning you in. Every single one of them rents a room out. And there are hundreds. Maybe thousands. Every single one. Tourist heaven. Airbnb will make a killing.

Again, our driver… what shall we call him? He needs a name. Jose? Juan? Jesus? How about Jorge?

So Jorge stops the car, gets out, stares down at a street sign — two numbers on a concrete block — pulls a piece of paper out of his wallet that has an address on it that is identical to the one in my hand given to me earlier by Gloria, who has made these arrangements, and hails two passersby.

The five of us are left in the bat-mobile, still running and pumping exhaust toward the back of my head. If you have forgotten, I am unable to open the door, as not only the window won’t roll down, but the door handle only works from the outside. And as we discovered, the same for the other backseat door. The nice German couple up front rescues us, and we all pile out and practice deep breathing.

Two people give our driver directions, thankfully indicating the same direction, using wild, staccato gestures in clipped Spanish. And boy are they friendly.

Nonplussed, our driver returns, and we all pile back into the bat-mobile, which is wheezing and seems now near death. With our headaches and nauseous stomachs, we all vow we will never, ever again take a taxi colectivo, but will pay the extra five bucks for an air-conditioned tourist bus and skip the culture lesson.

Another turn down hobbit lane and there is Numero 13, casa de Margarite y Jose. Rescued from inside the bowels of the bat-mobile, Margarite greets me with a kiss on my cheek, expertly takes my suitcase, swings it around and hauls it down the bumpy street. She says, “Voy a la casa de mi hermano,” or something like that.

I get the gist that I will not be staying with her but at her brother’s casa just down the road. Just for a moment, only a teensy-weensy poquito moment, I hesitate. Her brother’s house? Not hers? The bat-mobile is now far down the street, a distant black mirage bucking like a wild horse.

I stumble after Margarite. Three houses down, I walk through a metal gate. I see a family of four. Salsa music plays from a red and white highly polished motorcycle in the yard. A rooster crows and then ignores me. A frisky puppy strains on his leash and dances on his two back legs, begging for my attention. An adult woman and a teenage girl sit on rocking chairs. Two adult males rock back and forth with their shirts pulled up exposing their chubby bellies, giggling insanely. They are sharing a bottle of rum. Ahhhh… mi familia!