A friend emailed me this short article that might be of interest (I'm still hoping to bike the
length of Cuba before Castro dies). I omit the pictures...
Forever Bicycle
A photo essay by Marcia Miquelon
All images and text copyright Marcia Miquelon, 1997.
Contact the author at 608-274-3819.
This past January, armed with a camera and a bicycle, I headed to Cuba for a month's exploration.
Like many Americans, my understanding of this beautiful Carribean country was small and clouded.
However, I was intrigued by what I'd heard; that in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Bloc, Cuba's
oil supplies had dried up and that as a result, the country had turned to the bicycle to move goods
and people around. Monday morning traffic in downtown Havana Steel steed for a family of four.
I went expecting austerity: long lines for rationed goods; unsmiling faces; bureaucratic hassles;
the kind of greyness that good capitalists learn to associate with communism. What I found was a
relaxed land of strong sunshine, warm, kindhearted people, and bicycles, bicycles everywhere.
They are called Forever Bicycle, Flying Pigeon, Light Roadster. There's an ironic brand-name, since
the steel Chinese one-speeds which fill the streets of Cuba today are anything but light. With their
fenders, heavy-duty rear racks and extended rear axles (footrests for the passengers which commonly
sit astride the rack), these beasts of burden often tip the scales just shy of fifty pounds.
Unwieldy though they may be, especially loaded down with all manner of cargo, from sacks of rice to
pigs, to two or even three human passengers, these simple bicycles are the lynch-pin of
transportation in Cuba today. Together with an astounding array of pedal-powered taxis, vending
carts, load-carrying vehicles and the like, Cuba begins to feel like bicycle utopia. A bicycle taxi
transports passengers through Havana's colonial quarter. Cottage industry in Cuba: a roadside
bicycle mechanic. Making deliveries.
Not that "utopian" is the term your average Cuban would use to describe their reliance on pedal
power. Cubans love their cars, tending them with loving care even when they have no fuel to run
them. It is undeniably harder to get your family off to work and school every day using one bicycle
than it would be using a car. Some Cubans cycle for fun and fitness, but for most, it's a matter of
necessity.
Castro claims to have used Holland as a model of an industrialized country which has maintained its
reliance on bicycle transportation, and reaps the environmental, economic and health benefits of
this choice. After 1990, when the Soviet oil tankers stopped arriving in Havana harbor, the Cuban
government imported two million bicycles from China, and sold them for about a week's wages ($5
U.S.) to its citizens. Bicycle facilities were created, factories retrofitted, and domestic bicycle
production commenced. Today, bike-only busses carry cyclists from an eastern suburb under a causeway
to Havana, and former six-lane highways have been re-striped with a full lane in each direction for
bicycles only. Traveling companion for a morning. Every time the boy would hit a pothole, his cargo
(a live pig) would squeal. Still life with bicycle in the colonial city of Trinidad.
It is ironic, somehow, that the fall of the iron curtain combined with a stubborn, decades-old U.S.
trade embargo should create the perfect conditions for bicycle touring. Cars on the roads are few
and far between. Most of the legendary 1950's vintage Plymouths and DeSotos sit parked, their tanks
empty of gas. When I did encounter a car on the road, I could rest assured that the driver was also
a cyclist, and as such would treat me with patience and respect. I have never felt safer on a bike.
What's more, everywhere I looked, another ingenious pedal-powered contrivance captured my fancy, and
on nearly every road that I went down, I was surrounded by other cyclists happy to pass the
kilometers in conversation. Here are a few of many vivid images of Cuba's velorution.
Steve Juniper "Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere."