Life

Kingstown - St. Vincent

it's a serious day in Kingstown - St. Vincent

St. John's - Antigua

This trip in February was possible luckily just before the lockdown. After a long journey there from Vienna to Munich to Havana and after 5 hrs delay there (they were repairing the plane) we arrived in Santiago de Cuba at 3 am in the morning.

in a Taxi in Santiago de Cuba.........

The sugar mill "Argelia Libre" (former "Manati" until 1959) is no. 622 of Cuba. It has been founded in 1912. The factory closed in 2002 as many others and today only some ruins remain, as you will see in the next images.

Camagüey

This is the old mansion of the former mill "Dolores" (built 1854). Some people now found a home in its ruins. They have their own tower at least. But there are legends about hearing the sound of thick chains rubbing against the floor, the swaying of armchairs, and the footsteps of people in the nights. Some residents say they feel the lament of slaves whipped by their owners and other stories, linked to what was one of the important Cuban sugar mills. The factory owners had a large number of slaves for the domestic and agricultural work of the cultivation of sugar cane and their industrial work, in addition there were coffee plantations and palm groves, symbols of a splendor based on mistreatment and oppression. As was the custom at the time, the masters built a beautiful house there in 1872, a reflection of a remarkable economy of which there are still elements of its architecture, very deteriorated. The most striking thing is still the tower, which had a huge iron bell, whose tolling called for the endowment of slaves, dispersed in the more than 1600 hectares that made up the heritage.

an evening in Remedios

Did you know that Fidel Castro studied jurisprudence on a Jesuits-University in Havana?

Workers in the Hershey railway workshop, maintaining the locomotives, railcars and wagons of the Hershey line - the Cuban smile ;-)