Santa Clara and Valentine's day. Cuban chronicles. Day 13.

The city of Santa Clara is quite close to Caibarién but the road goes in between the hills and it's curvy. So, to sum up, we drove almost two hours to cover a distance of less than 60 kms.

We arrived in our new town and it's messy. It looks good but we are busy paying attention to the traffic and the directions to our new house. Even though I've never been here before, this place looks familiar, it kinda looks like a lot of Uruguay towns.

In front of one of the sides of the town's main square, the cinema and theatre Camilo.

After getting accomodated, we left to see one of the two touristic attractions in Santa Clara, Revolution Square and Che Guevara's museum and mausoleum. We were surprised to find out that the entrance was free (it was the only place we visited in the island with no entrance ticket). However, before entering you must leave absolutely everything in another place. We started looking at everything. Seeing those objetcs, the ones that were used to make history, for better or for worse, was moving. It was like I had to stop and imagine the moments those objects were used. Before entering, while we were at the square, some of the texts displayed there were moving as well.

the fun part at the museum was seeing photos of a baby and kid Ernesto Guevara when he already had that known expression in his eyes. The tour is organized chronologically and when you finish you access Che Guevara's and other guerrilla fighters' mausoleum.

On the way out, there's a bookstore which of course I went into and where I found a book written by Aleida March, Che Gevara's wife, about him and her life next to him. I still haven't read it, but I got it expecting to see a more human and less legendary perspective of the polemic guerrillero.

Once back downtown, we left the car and searched for a place to have lunch. It was hard, there weren't that many options and it's all crowded.

This city has a lot of life, but unlike the other ones we were at, most of the people we see are Cubans. There are a lot o young people too because of it having one o the biggest University Campus in Cuba. I believe that most of the tourists here are brought only to see the Revolution Square, the mausoleum and the train used to take Santa Clara and leave.

After lunch, my dad and I went for a walk but didn't see aything new. The anecdotical moment was when we went into a place that had written "cafeteria" all over it to have...well, coffee. But to our surprise, they didn't sell coffee. Silly me thnking that those things only happened in the Eastern beach places of Uruguay.

At night, we had the almost impossible mission to find a place to eat. And I say mission because it's Valentine's day and absolutely everybody goes out. Every place is crowded and the only one we found with a couple of available tables robbed us with their prices.

When I say everybody goes out, I mean everybody.

Like a modern version of the clown car, the mototaxis carried people non-stop.

We went back to the town square, the centre of the party. It's so crowded with couples, couples with children, groups of friends and elderly couples that were to die for. I even took a photo of a couple dancing, apart from the crowd, and went to sleep quite happy.

*You can read the original version of this post in Spanish here.