I didn’t see any tulips in Santa Clara but this week the town had a very Dutch flavour. Most of the people I met there on Monday were wearing orange, a colour which the local baseball team, Villa Clara, shares with the Dutch national football team. This week Villa Clara finally won the Cuban baseball championship after 17 years of waiting. Although I’m from England, where baseball is considered the younger brother of our cherished national sport cricket, I really like ‘la pelota’ and have had the pleasure of going to the Estadio Latino-Americano in Havana twice in the last few months to watch the local team, Industriales, play. On both occasions their pitching was woeful (for any cricket-lovers, pitching is like bodyline bowling) and, frankly, they deserved to lose. But it was a lot of fun and I learned some very choice Cuban vocabulary.
Villa Clara province (Santa Clara is its capital) encapsulates the strengths and challenges of Cuba’s economy. It has a beautiful coastline with scattered keys and gorgeous Caribbean beaches, which tourists flock to in their thousands every week. There are currently 6,000 hotel rooms in the province with plans to double that number by 2016 – an ambitious programme that will provide jobs in construction and hospitality. A lot more people – about 100,000 – work in agriculture; mainly tobacco, sugar and maize. There are many fewer sugar mills in Villa Clara than there used to be in the heyday of Cuba’s sugar industry but there are plans to reopen some of those that have closed. One idea is to burn sugar waste to produce renewable energy, a technology that British company Havana Energy will soon bring to the island.
Just as in other parts of the country, Villa Clara has seen a growing small-scale entrepreneurial sector as a result of the changes introduced by President Raul Castro’s government. About 33,000 people in the province now work in the ‘non-state’ sector, more than double the number from 2010. Many of these people work in private restaurants, bed and breakfasts, barber shops or as taxi drivers. Soon people will also be working in private co-operatives – the first, running a wholesale food market in Havana, will start work at the beginning of July. That’s an important step forward as it should, in theory at least, lead to more efficiency, less waste and better quality produce.
By the way, FC Villa Clara, also in orange, won the national football championship both last year and the year before. Sports capital of Cuba? It certainly looks like it.