An Excursion that Ended at the Beach (II)

In the first part of this narrative I described how my friend Abel and I arrived one February afternoon at Guanabo beach, to the east of the city, after a long hike through the surrounding hills.

There wasn’t a soul left on the shore at this hour – an unusual situation – due to a cold front which had enveloped the city.  We collapsed as soon as we reached the sand, overcome by fatigue and sleepiness. When we woke up, a pleasant surprise awaited us; two human butterflies had landed close by.

I’m talking about two young women between 20 and 25 years old, wearing swimsuits that left a lot of their skin exposed to the cold air. This seemed not to bother them, although our teeth were chattering.

It was all very strange: two beautiful women alone on a deserted beach in Cuba, appearing at our side in this unexpected way. In addition, this was precisely what we would have wanted to happen…too good to be true.

The principal difference between Abel and me is that he has no problem breaking the ice with the ladies. Because of that, the mission of drawing them into conversation fell to him. The mystery began to clear up when we heard their accent: they were from Rosario, Argentina.

A short time after Abel’s very effective opening lines, we found ourselves sitting together on the sand, facing each other and absorbed in animated conversation. While we satisfied our mutual curiosity in the best possible way, our conversation soon touched on the topic that they were most interested in and which had brought them to Cuba: politics.

This was the second time in a relatively short period that I had happened to run into a duo of beautiful and committed Argentinean women. (I wrote about the former occasion in another article). I began to reflect how difficult it was to run into young people like that from Cuba, not because of their attractiveness, a quality that abounds here, but for the political commitment that inspired them, a rare bird in these landscapes.

When I mentioned this to them, they replied that the levels of thoughtlessness, consumerism, colonized mentalities etc. are also very high over there, but that Cuba is the preferred tourist destination of those who are politically committed leftists. This fact, according to them, explained the high frequency of my encounters with such people from Argentina.

I wasn’t totally convinced, but we continued to talk anyway. Their curiosity was boundless and they asked a lot of questions. When the conversation had grown so spirited that I didn’t even feel the cold anymore, the girls suddenly noticed how late it had become and, excusing themselves, marched off to enjoy their last night in the city.

Such a drastic disappearance left us pensive and out of energy on the beach, just as night was falling and the cold returned.