A cleansing ceremony
The hard, red lump lodged on my cheek bone looked like a mini volcano. It was dormant, threatening something, but I wasn’t sure what. It had been clinging on for some time when I pitched up in Santiago de Cuba, in the island’s far east, a few days before the 40th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s rebel-fought revolution.
Santiago de Cuba, set in a bay on the Caribbean coast some 900 kilometres from the capital Havana, is surrounded by rugged peaks, which trap the heat of the earth with the humidity of the sky pressing the air into some kind of climate straitjacket that sucks the oxygen out of lungs when walking the city’s narrow historic streets. No one mentions humidity training in Cuba but the