camino places

The town is known as the “geographic center” of Cuba. At the center of the center grows an ancient Ceiba tree.

Placetas is not a metropole but with 72,000 people, it can sustain a more diverse social life than the smaller towns encountered on the route.

Esteban worked near Zulueta for years. He would take trains into town from the Ariosa or from El Purio looking for a good time.

We walk the line built by the Julian Zulueta in 1877 to carry his sugar from his mill, Zaza, in Placetas to the port of Caibarien.

I came to hide in a cave for a time. I lived there for a year and a half.

Remedios, properly named San Juan de los Remedios is one of the most beautiful cities in Cuba. It is probably the third settlement, behind Baracoa and Bayamo, established by the Spaniards in the 16th Century.

Esteban remembered Vueltas as the home of a certain bandit name Menendez who led the Spanish volunteer militia during the war against the Mambís.

This was the sugar mills where Esteban first worked as a free man. While the work was not much different than what he suffered as a slave–“The difference being that they didn’t hit you as much as during slavery.”

Fernando is a strong man. Tall and solid like the grey boulders behind us. Dressed all in brown from head to toe, with dark brown waterproof boots, and a straw hat the shape of a cowboy hat but with frayed edges.

Only a few ruins remain of the Mariana Grajales mill, (named in the late 1990s after the mother of the Cuban patriot Antonio Maceo), as is the case for most of the mills that roared during the heyday of sugar production on the island.