A Stroll Through Madruga
Photo Feature by Irina Echarry
HAVANA TIMES — When I was invited to Madruga, a town in nearby Mayabeque Province, the first thing I did was grab my camera.
My walk through the town — half rural and half urban — lasted just an hour and a half, but in that short time I was able to visit the village during the evening and night, admire its straight streets, see its large extended houses, check out the acoustics of the park’s arbor and breathe the pure air of the Loma de La Gloria incline.
That night that I slept in Madruga I remember as the most peaceful in recent years, since the corner near my building in Havana is always crowded with cars, buses and trucks. Waking up with the singing of birds was almost magical. For a moment I forgot about my life in the city and I reaffirmed my desire to go live in the country.
Here, I’m leaving with you photos of my walk through this place of quiet and industrious people, where bicycles and horse-drawn carriages are the most widely used forms of transportation.
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Your fotos and account of Madruga, evoke fond memories. During our trip in 2008, my daughter , our Cuban friend Franco Franco, and I stopped off in Madruga, where Daphne took a foto of a pig being loaded up onto a mini-truck (which can be seen in the archives, as part of the HT 2009 foto contest). Back in ’69 or ’70, during the Zafra de los Diez Millones, a group of us brigadistas who had gone into Habana for the weekend took a provincial guagua back to our camp one Sunday night. The bus only went as far as Madruga. and from there we felt our way north. A moonless night, we felt our way north, in almost total darkness, walking the remaining 10 km +/- surrounded by cane fields, to the campamento of the Brigada Venceremos, outside Aguacate.