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  Pinar del Rio
 Atenas de Cuba People-to-People Program
  
  Dispatch 1 - Havana

 

  
 
We left Havana on a truck fitted out to carry bikes and people. Along the way we stopped to collect our host Cuban cyclists who would be part of the international contingent. The truck, in size and character, wasn’t what I would have chosen for a support vehicle, but the Cubans wanted the program to have a support vehicle and choices were few so this is what they arranged. Click to enlarge

It is a long trip out of town. Passing through numerous suburbs on criss-crossing limited access roads with few road signs, it is hard to keep your bearings. As the land use becomes more agrarian there was a patch work of multipurpose small holder farms and then long stretches of large mono-culture state owned sugar plantations.

The truck ride ended and the cycling began in the city of Pinar del Rio, the capital of Pinar del Rio province. Pinar del Rio is a very human scale town with lots of 2 and 3 level buildings with ornate exteriors and extensive use of columns. The streets in the business district were busy with pedestrians and cyclists and lined with and assortment of merchants. Once we left town the dominate vehicles were new tourism buses and cars with the distinctive black "turismo" license plate. Rumor is that tourism is now Cuba’s largest earner of foreign exchange, but no one is sure if it is the largest grosser because of the large quantity of these dollars that must go back off-shore to feed the voracious consumptive appetites of foreign tourism.

 

  
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